Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

An aircraft with no onboard pilot, flown by remote control or autonomously — essentially a flying robot.

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft with no pilot on board; it can be remotely piloted or fly autonomously. Common forms include multirotors (such as quadcopters, which can take off vertically and hover, and are by far the most common), fixed-wing aircraft (longer range and endurance), and helicopter-style designs. In robotics, a UAV is treated as an “aerial robot”: it still needs state estimation, mapping, path planning, and control, but its motion happens in three-dimensional space and it's especially sensitive to weight and energy use. Directions connected to embodied AI include aerial vision-and-language navigation (flying to a target based on spoken instructions), aerial manipulation with an onboard arm, and coordinated multi-drone swarms. The open-source flight-controller stacks PX4 and ArduPilot are common research foundations, while DJI is the leading name in the consumer market.

ExampleTelling a quadcopter “fly over to the house with the red roof” and having it plan its own flight path from camera images to get there is an example of aerial vision-and-language navigation.

Also called

Aerial Robot, Drone

Related

Aerial Manipulation · Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation · PX4 / ArduPilot · DJI · Swarm Intelligence · Motion Planning

Sources

Wikipedia: Unmanned aerial vehicle