they are robots
used by military
some are autonomous

$18 billion to be spent over three years on technologies that included those needed for autonomous weapons.

The prototype Taranis stealth drone, being designed by BAE Systems and expected to be operational by 2030, will mostly run autonomously.

The small drone, with its six whirring rotors,

But armed with advanced artificial intelligence software, it had been transformed into a robot that could find and identify the half-dozen men carrying replicas of AK-47s around the village and pretending to be insurgents.