TABLE OF CONTENTS The military market for UAVs has shown a strong positive trend since the end of the Cold War (1990) and this is expected to accelerate in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This is largely due to the outbreak of, and U.S. involvement in, numerous contingencies since then. Concurrently the size of the U.S. military has been drawn down over the same period, fanning a desire for increased reliance on robotics. The commercial market trend for robotics is also steadily upward, although not so strong. Technology has supported these trends, with the availability of ever cheaper and more capable microprocessors enabling these robotics. The major hurdles to the continuation of this trend are the increasing amount (and cost) of the software involved and the silicon chip manufacturing barrier, due to be reached in the 2015 2020 timeframe.
Throughout history, new technologies have been the enablers of new economies, and a number of new technologies are emerging at the dawn of the twenty-first century with great promise for aviation, unmanned and manned. The biological sciences have seen tremendous advances over the past decade, to the extent bioengineers and aerospace engineers may soon be working on common aircraft projects. The need for lighter, stronger aero- structures has led from wood to aluminum to titanium to composites. The next step may well be transgenetic biopolymers. A commercial company has succeeded in breeding goats with the silk-producing gene of spiders in their mammary glands and is productionizing the extraction of this...
