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Top1. Introduction
In the last two decades, the term ‘drone’ usually meant a flying robot, but this has been expanded to include any mobile robot. In this paper, ‘drone’ and ‘robot’ are used interchangeably. They are now found in the aerial, terrestrial, aquatic and space environments. Combined with artificial intelligence and a myriad of sensors, they have become formidable weapons and surveillance platforms (see Dougherty, 2015 for the range involved). In fact, defence against them is difficult for all but the most well-resourced entities. This phenomenon stimulated the start of this research, which concentrates on autonomous rather than just automatic robots. The US Department of Defence (US DOD, 2014, p. 15) gives a simple explanation that an autonomous robot as: “when the aircraft [drone] is under remote control, it is not autonomous. And when it is autonomous, it is not under remote control.” In other words, it is independent of humans for its operating actions.
When considering the ‘intelligence’ and ‘knowledge’ aspects of this topic, it is useful to look at the types of systems that have been developed as these types of systems. Cummings (2017) states there is a hierarchy of knowledge systems starting with skills-based behaviours, then rules-based, then knowledge-based and finally expertise-based. Skills-based relies on the perception-cognition-action loop and can be automated without much difficulty. As the need for complexity increases, multiple and compound processes can be accomplished by Rules-based learning. The next two levels of system require a higher level of learning where Knowledge-based reasoning is needed where the stored set of rules does not match the existing environment, so a new set of rules have to be created. Expert-based systems use judgement and intuition. Although the move from automated to autonomous systems changes at the rules-based level, it is really at the Expert level that solutions to the ambiguities in the environment can start to be trusted. Cummings (ibid) contends that, there are no truly reliable autonomous systems relying on Knowledge-based or Expert based systems, in operation currently. Hence, whilst there are many automated systems there are not truly, fully autonomous ones.