Time to clear up some misconceptions about autonomy, especially related to UAVs.
What is autonomy?
Autonomy is commonly defined as the ability to make decisions without human intervention. To that end, the goal of autonomy is to teach machines to be "smart" and act more like humans.
X47-B raises the bar in this regard in comparison to other drones such as RQ-170 and RQ-4.
I have already provided you reasonable hint which you FAILED to grasp:
According to Kellenberger, "the capacity to discriminate" in warfare is a requirement of international humanitarian law. In the case of advanced drones, that capacity will "depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming" employed as opposed to individuals, Kellenberger says. The ICRC is addressing the issue as it relates to the Geneva Conventions. Drones now account for 7,500 aircraft in the military and one-third of all military aircraft today, the L.A. Times reported Thursday. Drone platforms represent potential cost and combat benefits. There is currently no plan to allow the X-47B to autonomously make decisions about killing enemy combatants. But that may change. In the Air Force's report (PDF), the Air Force states that "authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions."
X47-B have greater variety of onboard sensors in comparison to RQ-170 and RQ-4 drones, as pointed out by me earlier:
Your silly argument is that these sensors have nothing to do with autonomous capabilities. Do you work in Northman? Do you know that how these technologies are being put to use?
Now what is a Robot?
Robots are physical agents that perform tasks by manipulating the physical world. They are equipped with sensors to perceive their environment and effectors to assert physical forces on it.
There are many differences between 'autonomous flight management'...
ScienceDirect.com - Acta Astronautica - The concept of autonomous flight management system for future spacecraft
The concept of autonomy is regarded as an important issue for the future spacecraft management system. For a possible one approach to design an autonomous system, ideas from artificial intelligence (AI) are applied in a sense that the parametric relationship among relevant system parameters can be learned during the operation or the intended learning process. The results are stored successively in the knowledge data base, sets of information of which again are used during the operation in the learning process. A scope of the autonomous flight management system based on the proposed learning system as well as simulated results are discussed.
...Versus 'autonomous mission management'...
Autonomous mission management for unmanned aerial vehicles | Mendeley
The management performed by the architecture relates to the objectives of the mission. The response time to an external event does not need to be strictly defined; the architecture behaves like a soft real-time system. The mission of the vehicle is to observe several local areas in dynamic, partially known and unsafe environments. The vehicle must carry out an operation on each area while satisfying constraints related on the vehicle, the environment and the mission. The architecture contains a planning component, which computes the optimal sequence for the observation of the mission areas. The situation becomes degraded when the execution of the initial plan is no longer possible. The architecture makes it possible to react to these degraded situations; the calculation of a new plan takes into account the new constraints.
Flight management is about the nitty-gritty details of flying, such as fuel, trim, airspeed, altitude, communication, and so on all things that are
DIRECTLY related on how to keep an aircraft flying.
Mission management is about going from A to Z via B and E but not M through T because of storm, air defense radar, local air traffic, and so on. All things that are
EXTERNAL to the aircraft that cannot be accurately predicted to within a certain percentage.
There are overlaps between the two and that overlap is based upon sensory sophistication. If a UAV lost communication with its handlers and if it is programmed to be able to land by itself, that capability is an overlap between flight and mission management enabled by sensory sophistication inevitably followed by software sophistication to exploit the former. Return to base (RTB) and land is an inherent part of any flight mission, unless we are talking about expendable UAVs, aka cruise missiles, so RTB is part of mission management. How to navigate out of the current location and how to land once the UAV reached home base is technical flight management.
If a UAV is programmed to indiscriminately land at the nearest base, friend or foe is unknown, then that is also part of mission management, as in what to do in the event of A, B, and C. It is a much less sophisticate mission management software but mission management nonetheless. However, the autonomous flight management sophistication is still the same in that once the FLCS received instructions from guidance to land, it would be no difference between on how to land at a 'friendly' runway or a 'hostile' runway. Autonomous flight management does not care. It should not have to care.
In flight refueling is mission management in that the UAV is instructed, either beforehand to go to point A to refuel, or during flight to divert to point A to refuel. How to maintain stable flight, open the refuel system, and take on fuel, falls under autonomous flight management. If the UAV is instructed during flight to divert to an unexpected mission change, and if it alert the handlers that it does not have sufficient fuel, the ability to alert its handlers to a potential hazard falls under autonomous mission management. If it does not alert and simply obey the diversion command, fly until it run out of fuel and crash, it is still autonomous mission management, albeit not very sophisticated one.
To drop a bomb is autonomous flight management. To discriminate whether a structure is a hospital or a weapons depot is mission management, autonomous or not. How to discriminate? What if a weapons depot give of some kind of non-visible spectral signature that a hospital, a school, or a house of religion does not? Then if a sensor is available to pick up that signature, we can turn that discrimination over to autonomous flight management instead of having the human operators spending time scrutinizing videos to see if the structure is A or B or C before making a decision. In this case, sensory sophistication enabled greater autonomy in both flight and mission planning with little or no human interventions.
Clear as mud?
