How autonomous are drones?

Factual Questions
1

Are drones just R/C airplanes on steroids, or do some of them handle things like takeoff and landing autonomously? I was in a discussion with a coworker who used to work on the local university’s DARPA Challenge entry and he maintained that drones were remotely piloted the whole time. I bet that’s true for older models, but what about the newer ones?

Thanks,
Rob

2

Depends on the drone. Local use drones, such as a squad or company might use to survey the ground ahead are strictly local. The big ones as I believe you are thinking of (Predator and Reaper) take-off and land under local control. While on the mission, they are controlled by satellite link from remote sites. If the signal is interrupted, the drone will autonomously fly a pattern waiting for a signal return. It may return to it’s initial location and be locally landed if the satellite signal isn’t restored.

3

Obligatory xkcd:

4

So they can do very little by themselves? Is anything more autonomous on the horizon? I had always thought that the human element in things like the Predator were making decisions about where to task the sensors and actually firing missiles.

Thanks,
Rob

5

They are designed to have a human in the loop. Loading in flight levels, routes and the like can and are done ahead of time. But a human (multilevels of humans) evaluates the targets in real time with respect to priorities and additional intellegence information to decide targeting and launching actions. The kicker is “…in real time”.

We have cruise missiles that do all kinds of autonomous actions like altitude changes, terrain following, matching up the target image with stored data, etc… Works well against static targets like buildings. But sending cruise missiles against small moving land targets with unknown human target information is a waste of money and effort not to mention hitting a civilian bus as opposed to a truck of similiar size passing on the road nearby.

6

Here is an article about the Navy’s new X-47B stealth drone.

So it looks like it’s all manually controlled now but they’re working toward making this new drone autonomous.

7

I was just wondering if take off and landing autonomously are solved problems.

Thanks,
Rob