Drone

A drone, formally an unmanned aerial vehicle, is an aircraft that carries no human pilot, crew or passengers and is flown either autonomously or by remote control; the technology was developed first for military missions judged too dangerous or repetitive for a human pilot before spreading into civilian uses such as aerial photography, farm monitoring, infrastructure inspection and recreational flying as controls improved and costs fell. Some of the earliest recorded unmanned aerial attacks came in July 1849, when Austrian forces launched roughly 200 unmanned incendiary balloons at Venice, with limited success once the wind shifted; more deliberate development followed in the early 1900s, when the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo demonstrated his radio-controlled Telekino system in 1903, and Britain built remote-controlled target drones for military training through the 1930s. Wider tactical use did not arrive until reconnaissance drones proved themselves during the Vietnam War, after which the technology expanded from military surveillance to civilian roles and even planetary exploration.