In the twentieth century, much of the developmental effort devoted to weaponry and military technology was geared towards creating weapons with the power to eliminate entire cities through sheer might. Today, the changing nature of conflict has led to the development of military systems and technologies designed to help combatants select, identify and eliminate targets with minimal collateral damage. While unmanned systems are hardly new, particularly in military settings, the sheer level of sophistication, performance, and rising level of autonomy associated with these systems is recent, and largely in sync with the enhanced development of robotic technology over the past 20 years. The development of robotic technology, which includes the use of programming logic that allows a device to operate autonomously, has bolstered the development of new types of military equipment that handle many tasks more quickly, accurately and inexpensively than conventional technology, while also saving lives.
This study covers the markets for defense robotics, focusing on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones; unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs); unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and their major components, forecasting the outlook for spending on each, both on a monetary and unit-shipment basis, for the forecast period of 2010 through 2016, segmented by major global region.