  How I Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom    • By
Chris Anderson   • 6:32 AM         Photo: Misha Gravenor  Chris
Anderson started 3D Robotics in a living room. Now it has over
30 employees and manufacturing operations in San Diego (shown)
and Tijuana, Mexico. Photo: Misha Gravenor  What exactly do we
mean by drone? The definition has changed over the years, but
today it refers to aircraft that have the capability of
autonomous flight, which means they can follow a mission from
point to point (typically guided by GPS, but soon this will also
be possible through vision and other sensors). This
differentiates them, on the one hand, from radio-controlled
aircraft, which need to be manually piloted, and on the other
from uncontrolled vehicles like balloons or ballistic rockets.
Usually drones—also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or
unmanned aerial systems (UAS), to include the ground-station
components—also carry some sort of payload, which at a bare
minimum includes cameras or other sensor