24 In the words of Dr Donough Wilson in our inaugural issue, in November 2014, “There are no rules.” It’s a stance echoed by our editorial director Ian Bamsey to describe the scope for fresh ideas and uninhibited engineering across the world of uncrewed systems. That was in 2014, at a time when seminal uncrewed vehicle programmes such as the Insitu ScanEagle, AAI Aerosonde and Kongsberg Hugin had begun inspiring a multitude of other companies around the world to explore this new frontier of technology. And indeed, the industry was very much a global one by this point – that first issue featured a Latvian UAV, a German engine, a British USV and an American HAPS. This magazine’s founders were eager to explore this emerging industry and the new technologies and ideas it might bear. As with any new frontier technology industry however, they naturally had some trepidation that a crash, consolidation or other contractions in the industry could also come within the following few years, putting a damper on the number of companies and innovations worth reporting on in these pages. Fortunately, even their most pessimistic projections failed to come Rory Jackson looks at some of the key trends in uncrewed systems covered in our first 50 issues, and points to others that could emerge in the future Setting the June/July 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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