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by Evolved 3889 days ago
I don't think we agree on what "autonomous" means. Preprogramming a flight path to follow doesn't meet the definition of autonomous nor does autopilot following waypoints.

Autonomous, at least to me, means the drone takes off, searches out a sight ("drone, fine me a bridge and take pictures of it") and then makes the decision to fly to it and perform some kind of action whether it be photographic/videographic/some kind of monitoring (commercial drones) or a kinetic action (military drones).

Basically, when drones get AI then I'd personally consider them to be autonomous. YMMV