ABSTRACT
The first design of an uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) is generally considered to have been Leonardo Da Vinci’s 1488 sketch entitled ‘Non il volo umano’ or ‘non-human flight’. Following this, little development occurred, beyond the use of uninhabited hot air balloons, until four centuries later during World War I when Elmer Sperry designed and tested an ‘automatic airplane’, a project abandoned at the end of the war and before completion. In the years that followed, UAVs were mainly developed for single use ballistic payload delivery, essentially as ‘flying bombs’, the precursors of today’s intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
