Aerial / UAV
1 robot · scored byAMX
Uncrewed aircraft — multirotor, fixed-wing and VTOL hybrids — for inspection, delivery, survey and defence.
Drones in 2026: the market at a glance
One drone is tracked so far: Matrice 350 RTK by DJI, scored 67.3 on the Aerial Metric (AMX).
How this category is scored
The Aerial Metric (AMX), version
0.2.0. Pillars are weighted for what
actually matters to this class, and normalised against
aerial / uav-specific reference scales.
Not applicable to this category: Manipulation & Dexterity, Ecosystem & Viability. These pillars are excluded from the index and the remaining weights renormalised — not scored zero.
Category profile
Every company in this category is re-checked on the cadence above by the research agents, and every proposed change is reviewed before it reaches this page.
Top aerial / uav robots
Full aerial / uav leaderboard — all 1 with filters →| # | Robot | Company | Status | Autonomy | AMX |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Matrice 350 RTK | DJI | commercial | supervised-autonomy | 67.3 |
Why the AMX weighs what it weighs
The published reasoning behind every pillar weight in
the Aerial Metric, version 0.2.0.
- Mobility (0.32) — the axis everything else trades against. Endurance leads: battery-vs-fuel, rotor-vs-wing and payload-vs-range are all negotiations with flight time. Range is scored separately rather than derived from endurance × speed, or a tethered drone would rank as the best aircraft in the class.
- Autonomy (0.25) — the same ladder as everywhere. The commercial question in this class is BVLOS and one-operator-many-aircraft, which is precisely what the ladder measures.
- Hardware (0.20) — payload, payload-as-a-fraction-of-MTOW, and wind rating, which is an availability number disguised as a spec: it decides how many days a year the aircraft can fly at all.
- Commercial (0.23) — a genuinely shipping class with real regulatory gates, so shipping is strong evidence.
- Manipulation (0.00) — excluded. Aerial manipulation is a research topic, not a market. Scoring it would give every commercial drone a zero for lacking something no buyer is asking for.
- Ecosystem (0.00) — excluded. DJI's scale and a Series-A startup's raise are not the same quantity.
Frequently asked questions
How many drones are there in 2026?
This index tracks 1 drone from 1 company, counting only machines documented by at least two independent sources.