An unmanned aerial vehicle is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system; which include a UAV, a ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two.
The term drone, more widely used by the public, was coined in reference to the early remotely-flown target aircraft used for practice firing of a battleship's guns, and the term was first used with the 1920s Fairey Queen and 1930's de Havilland Queen Bee target aircraft. These two were followed in service by the similarly-named Airspeed Queen Wasp and Miles Queen Martinet, before ultimate replacement by the GAF Jindivik.
The flight of UAVs may operate with various degrees of autonomy: either under remote control by a human operator or autonomously by onboard computers.
Compared to crewed aircraft, UAVs were originally used for missions too "dull, dirty or dangerous for humans.
While they originated mostly in military applications, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications, such as policing, peacekeeping, and surveillance, product deliveries, aerial photography, smuggling, and drone racing.
Civilian UAVs now vastly outnumber military UAVs, with estimates of over a million sold by 2015
A drone or a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) typically refers to a pilotless aircraft that operates through a combination of technologies, including computer vision, artificial intelligence, object avoidance tech, and others. But drones can also be ground or sea vehicles that operate autonomously.
