WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?

 

The first unmanned vehicle was designed and built in 1916 by an English inventor named Archibald Low. The English wanted an unmanned airplane they could load with explosives and crash into the Germans. You wouldn’t call it a robot; more like a guided missile.

During World War II, several models of remote-operated aircraft came into use, mostly as practice targets for antiaircraft gunners. The first pilotless reconnaissance craft was probably a weather balloon with a camera dangling from it. What we think of today as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles weren’t used in combat operations until the Vietnam War.

During the eighties, the CIA developed a sudden fever for small, quiet, unmanned spy planes. They wanted an unmanned vehicle that could replace the aging U2 spy plane—something that could quietly linger high in the sky and watch without being seen. At the time, there were several models of UAV to choose from, and all of them were outfitted with the latest in spy-camera technology. But they also all suffered from a relatively short range, a low maximum altitude, and engines that sounded like a South African soccer game. It wasn’t until the early nineties that the CIA finally got what it wanted in the form of the General Atomics Predator.

With the use of the Predator in several war zones throughout the nineties, the utility of remote-operated vehicles and robots was proven. Nowadays, the military robot field is crowded with players like iRobot (PackBot), Foster-Miller (TALON), and a dozen other companies, all competing to make the tiniest, deadliest machine they can.