Yeah, I can see that. Too bad because "drone" also has the connotation of "dumb" or "slave", which is the opposite of what you want an autonomous vehicle to be that's sharing your airspace. (It makes more sense in the remotely-piloted case, as in the military versions.) But words take on their own lives, and I guess there are now "drones".
I'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon. We shouldn't be calling remotely piloted quadcopters drones either, but "drone" has become a modern colloquialism for any UAV that isn't a remote controlled hobby plane.
I imagine this is one of the ways in which language evolves, for better or for worse.
Yes. And generally speaking, the term 'drone' is dumb and should be avoided because everybody gets weird ideas about what it means. It started as a pun, applied to a radio controlled aircraft rigged as a gunnery target, designed to fly once before dying like a drone bee. In just about any case where you might say "drone", there is a more precise and self-explanatory term you could use instead. For instance
> The connotations of "drone" are not great. (The next word in the bi-gram would be "strike"...) Maybe we can go back to "UAV" or pick another term for non-militarized, commercial delivery.
You have your connotations backwards. You'll see no consumer drones marketed as UAVs, but plenty of military drones are called that.
I dislike the use of the word drone too. To me it means something that is autonomous. Most hobby quadcopters are not autonomous, although they could be with a sophisticated flight controller. So they can technically be autonomous but usually they are not. So "drone" is a generalisation. It's kind of like saying "I drove my vehicle" rather than "I drove my car".
Well, as an aerospace engineer, I don't think any vehicle should be called a drone. Unmanned [Combat] Aerial Vehicle is a better term, or even Remotely Piloted Vehicle.
But if we must use the label, let's say that a 'drone' meets one of the following:
* Has weapons
* Operates autonomously
* Operates over the horizon
* Requires runway facilities -- large remotely-piloted aircraft
Everything else is just RC, including the quadrotors in the article.
The connotations of "drone" are not great. (The next word in the bi-gram would be "strike"...) Maybe we can go back to "UAV" or pick another term for non-militarized, commercial delivery.
"Drone" in this context just means "remote controlled aircraft." The term has been used that way since World War II. It doesn't imply autonomous flying, after all, even "Predator drones" are remotely piloted by humans.
The problem with the word "Drone" is that it's been used to mean everything, from the $5 toy that hovers above your hand, the $3000 VR Headset racing models, the military versions of the same that serve as recon tools, the modern man-portable-anti-tank weapons like the Switchblade [1]
, to full-sized ground attack airplane replacements like the Predator. It's insane that they've all been lumped under a single label.
Yes - this is what I'd refer to as a drone, something that can autonomously fly.
It just seems to be being used as a catch all scare mongering term for all RC aircraft though - and given how long they've been around with a perfectly fine track record, it's becoming a bugbear.
The word "drone" is such a buzzword, I used to have a radio controlled aka RC plane as a kid and the US military tends to a military remote controlled aircraft an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle UAV.
But drone is single word easy to say with some buzz to it and I guess it also sounds ominous.
My understanding is a drone in the military sense is a flying target a UAV is not.
It took 20 years for people to stop calling anything tech/Internet related "cyber" now calling anything that flies is a drone that word will be with us until 2034.
Yeah. There was a time maybe 8-9 years back where at least a section of the hobby tried to push back against the people using the term "drone" for any quadcopter/multirotor, and trying to educate people that only things capable of autonomous flight were "drones", while regular non-autonomous quadcopter really are just RC helicopters.
We lost that fight a long time ago.
(And I'm not even sure we were "right" to be honest. The term "drone" got used back in WW2 era for radio controlled aircraft used for target practice. There sure as hell were not autonomous... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioplane_OQ-2 )
I know it is too late for this to get fixed, but i am so tires of people saying "drone" when they mean "RPV". This idea in particular would be much more capable if they actually did use Drones instead of RPVs.
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