There is a huge variety of drones available nowadays. Let’s take a look at some of the commonly used types of UAVS and their uses.

Global Hawk

Global hawk is a 13.5 meters long, 4.6 meters tall and 3,850 kilograms heavy drone that was built during the High Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrator (HAE UAV ACTD) program, which was started by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO) during 1994. It was a military operation and Golden Hawk is normally used for military purposes only.

Predator B

It was built during 2000 and contains a powerful turbocorp engine. It was basically designed to be used for various purposes as desired by the customer purchasing it and has a very attractive design. Predator B is used for surveillance, reconnaissance, delivering weapons and targeting.

Altair

It is type of Predator B and was created for conducting commercial as well as scientific research. NASA was partly responsible for its design and creation. It has a strong flight controlling system, fault-tolerant architecture and three redundant avionics that increase its reliability.

X-47A

X-47A was designed as well as built by Northrop Grunman. It was created for demonstrating inexpensive and frequent prototyping, aiding strong management of vehicles as well as launching and recovering flight operations.

MQ-8B Navy Fire Scout

This drone provides extraordinary awareness of different situations, and is mainly used by the navy of the U.S. It has only been used for government related tasks. It has an endurance of more than seven hours and has the ability to provide over five hours on a station with payload at 200 km from the site it is launched.

Predator A

Predator A is also known as the Predator and was evolved using the GNAT system. It makes use of common mechanical system and avionics. It consists of Rotax 4 cylinder engine and has a great endurance time of around forty hours. Predator has also been used mainly for military operations.

Its data system is linked with a satellite and this drone also contains a gimbal stabilized with EO/IR that contains two video cameras.

Mariner

This drone is one of Predator B’s derivatives. It is a multipurpose and high altitude aircraft that is suitable for quite long maritime as well as surveillance missions on the border. It has the capacity to carry extra fuel and can easily function on missions that span around forty nine hours. The Mariner offers reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence services.

I-GNAT

It is a very useful drone that has an extremely long endurance that spans more than forty hours. Moreover, it has low maintenance, a huge capacity of payload and is quite user friendly. It is a revised version of GNAT-750 and is normally used for military purposes.

These are some of the drones that are widely used for military, surveillance and intelligence operations. Besides these, three more UAVS are going to be  launched soon. These include X45-A, ER/MP and Army I-GNAT ER.