Why Drone Minds, Why Drones?

A Drone Minds forums member posted a reply to a camera boat thread the other day, which automatically posted a link to said post on @droneminds on Twitter. Well, not long after, a Twitter member, @FXHex  replied to the Tweet and the conversation went thusly :
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@droneminds now rc boats are drones?

@FXHex do you think drones have to fly?

@droneminds no but I think rc boat has been a good enough name for the last 50 years? Why associate it with a perceived threat in any way?

@FXHex Not sure what you mean there? It's about being autonomous, not a threat.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2822816/The-ocean-going-drone-boat-scour-seas-months-tracking-rare-fish-lead-fuel-free-ships.html
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And that was the end of that.

The link was provided to show that boats are also called drones in the media, and that it doesn’t have to be connected with something bad.

Still, I have been thinking about this question, why is everything autonomous a drone now?

To be honest, not that long ago it seems, I was a strong advocate for not using the word drone in connection with UAVs, ROVs and Rovers etc, much preferring their technical name or quadcopter or multirotor etc. A lot of folks still hold to this, perhaps @FXHEX is one of them?

There are good reasons not to call these little helpers drones. Like @FXHEX says, why associate them with a perceived threat in any way?

Well, why would we? They aren’t a threat, they help us explore the world around us in ways we hardly imagined ten years ago. They can bring aid to us in new ways, to places other machines or humans can’t easily reach.

Of course they could be used for bad, which is why the media started calling these commercial UAVs and scientific bots drones in the first place. They want us to focus on the negative. Bad, scary news sells. The word ‘drone’ implies something mindless, or something with a mind of its own that is out of our control. No one ever used the word drone to describe these things but the media. When did you ever see a newspaper or TV headline that said UAV shot down over wherever… or Quadcopter Lands on Whitehouse Lawn? Never, right? It’s always Drone does this and Drone does that, like an unknowable threat.

These are the negative connotations that @FXHEX, and I myself not long ago, was alluding to.

Well, the media isn’t going to stop using the word ‘Drone’, whether it’s a $20 Hubsan Mini Quad, $800 DJI Phantom, or a $4 million General Atomics MQ-1 Predator UAV, so why fight it?

History has shown that the only way to dispel negative labels is to embrace them, take away their negative power and use them positively.



So we have become drone minds, drone enthusiast, promoting drones for good.

I believe our our mission, and all those reading this who see the value of these autonomous machines of all shapes and sizes that help further our understanding of our environment and capture amazing images, is to promote the ‘drone’ label as a source of good and betterment through demonstrating this with our actions, drone use and letting the world see the positive uses for drones.

Jonathan Malory