They are fairly autonomous and goal seeking, the military does not use 1 pilot per drone. Details rapidly become classified after this point. But, the DoD does a lot of AI research and put's this stuff into practice see cruse missiles for some ancient, but still powerful tech.
Yes, indeed cruise missiles are robots (they have a sophisticated automated guidance and auto pilot for a start).
My understanding is that most drones are remotely controlled by human pilots/personnel. I saw a documentary about this and they seemed pretty dumb compared with military tech from the 80s such as cruise missiles.
I'm sure that they are working on AI controlled drones but I'm pretty sure none of them are autonomous yet. They would have to be Asimov machines to some extent to prevent them from doing bad stuff to allies and friends or even their owners.
No robot AI combo to my knowledge is yet safe or reliable enough to be deployed on their own unsupervised. If they think that they are then, boy, are they going to get their asses kicked sooner or later when they inevitably malfunction.
Many newer UAVs are fully autonomous in the flight operations sense, as they are able to take off, fly a pre-defined track through a set of waypoints and return to land all without direct human intervention.
As an example, the US Navy's X-47B UCAS-D demonstrator has already demonstrated autonomous flight, but the USN plans to test autonomous carrier landings at sea sometime next year with fully-autonomous aerial refuelling the year after that.
The thing is, autonomous flight isn't that difficult and the technology for it has been in place for some time. Where complications arise is with bad weather, which can confuse an aircraft's sensors; situations where precision instrument approaches aren't available and, most importantly, other aircraft. There is still not complete certainty that it's safe to fly an autonomous UAV in congested airspace where other other pilots often do unexpected things.
Many of these issues can be solved by technical means alone, including the ability to monitor, anticipate and avoid other aircraft. But we're still a very long way from solving that fuzzy boundary when things go wrong and only human judgement can prevent disaster.
I also do not believe that aircraft like the X-47B will be given autonomous freedom to select their own targets when they are deployed in about a decade. Instead, while they'll fly autonomously, their targets will be selected by human operators who'll also authorise the release of weapons.
True autonomy is going to require the answering of plenty of technical and ethical questions.
"True autonomy is going to require the answering of plenty of technical and ethical questions."
Precisely my point. Thanks. We all know flight autonomy is already here. Has been for ages.
The aerial refuelling is a neat trick which I'm not convinced will be able to be taken for granted yet -- I can see this won't become fully autonomous for a while. That procedure would have to be completely predictable and reliable -- at least as reliable as a human-managed manoeuvre and that isn't without risk.
Just pointing out that 'autonomy' can mean different things depending on your point of view. The kind of autonomy that has already been achieved coupled to a reasonably safe ability to operate in congested air space will mean that regular autonomous cargo flights will become possible.
As for aerial refuelling, I think autonomous probe & drogue refuelling is definitely feasible. They've already proven the ability of the X-47B's flight systems to maintain the refuelling position behind a 707, which is technically one of the harder things to get right.
One of the reasons aerial refuelling is so tricky is that it requires constant rapid adjustments by the pilot in the receiving aircraft to stay in position while receiving fuel. The X-47B should be able to process those adjustments much faster than a human pilot.
Any aircraft can fly itself. Automation in flight systems is not new nor does it even require a computer. Negative feedback systems in both machines and in biology can do it very well -- in insects and birds it happens beautifully.
Early autopilots were analogue and worked remarkably well. Drones can keep flying and gliding without help (as long as they have power and fuel) -- of course they can. Its a classic and ancient application. But right now that makes them one step above a paper dart -- all be it with weaponry and reconnaissance. And that don't work without human intervention.
They are merely a remote extension of their human pilot's hand. Thankfully, because no one wants an autonomous drone going off on its own to "discover itself".
The ability for a 'pilot' to specify they want surveillance of some area and a drone fly's around pointing a camera at that area is a little more complex than simple autopilot. Classic reconnaissance aircraft often had multiple people to handle all of the complexity's involved, moving to having less than one person per plane and doing the same job takes a lot of automation. That said, something like the MQ-1 Predator actually uses multiple people on the ground due to this issue as does the MQ-9 Reaper which can do autonomous flight operations. But, both systems use multiple aircraft at the same time and have less than one controller per aircraft.
