Reimagining Industry Growth

5Unmanned Systems

When I was younger, I was fascinated and delighted by movie and cartoon depictions of a futuristic world filled with flying cars, moving sidewalks, self-driving transit systems, and lots of robots handling all sorts of everyday functions. Almost everything was automated. Some of it struck me as fanciful and even pretty far-fetched. Now I'm not so sure any of it was as unlikely as it seemed not so long ago. The future is upon us. Unmanned systems of every variety are a reality.

Unmanned systems can be defined as the technologies, hardware and software, that do or enable other things to do all manner of tasks either by remote control or automatically with little or no human interaction, intervention, or interference. The number of things that fall into this category is already immense, and growing rapidly and continuously. The impact of unmanned systems on everyday life is as vast as it is disruptive. And it looks for all the world like it's here to stay.

The World of Unmanned Systems

The variety of unmanned systems ideas and thinking, technologies and applications, current and future, in many ways defies a coherent taxonomy because so many disparate components overlap and intertwine in ways that are hard to label. There are, nevertheless, some general buckets that will serve our purposes as we begin to make sense of the unmanned systems ecosystem.

First, though, let's get a sense of the community that inhabits and sustains the unmanned systems ecosystem. ...