Uncrewed Aircraft & Drone Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
- 27.7% of all 2,339 records sit with just five assignees, with the leader alone holding 191 records — a concentrated top tier over a long tail of single-digit filers.
- Airframe and control classes dominate, with B64C (aeroplanes & helicopters) on 43.3% of records and B64D (aircraft equipment) on 24.4%, while wireless networking (H04W, 5.7%) remains comparatively thin.
- Filings fell 41% from 2021 to 2024, the last year the dataset can treat as complete — a real pullback from the 2020 peak of 226, not an artefact of publication lag.
Filing growth compares 2021 (150 records) with 2024 (89) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 2,339 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape draws on 2,339 published records matching uncrewed aircraft and drone terminology combined with flight-condition, aerodynamic-load, engine-thrust and airframe-sensor language, spanning 2015 through the 2026-08-31 data cut-off. The scope favours records where control, structural and propulsion claims intersect with autonomy or remote-piloting terms, rather than every drone-adjacent filing in existence. Patent families, not raw document counts, drive the assignee ranking, which neutralises continuation filings and multi-jurisdiction duplicates.
Coverage runs across aerospace primes, propulsion specialists and smaller autonomy-focused filers, with receiving offices concentrated in the United States and Europe. Because publication trails filing by roughly 18 months, the final one or two years in any trend chart will always look lighter than they eventually turn out to be.
Filing trends and technology composition
The two views below use the full 2,339-record scope: one tracks filing activity over time, the other breaks records down by IPC subclass. Because a single record can carry several IPC codes, the class shares add to more than 100% of the record total — that is expected and does not indicate double-counting of records.
A pullback from the 2020 peak
Filings ran from 169 in 2017 up to a peak of 226 in 2020, then declined to 150 by 2021 and to 89 by 2024 — a 41% drop over that three-year span, the last period the dataset can treat as complete. Years after 2024 are still filling in under publication lag and should not be read as a continuation of the decline.
Airframe and control classes carry the field
B64C (aeroplanes & helicopters) appears on 43.3% of records and B64D (aircraft equipment) on 24.4%, with the dedicated unmanned-vehicle class B64U at 20.4% and non-electric control (G05D) at 18.3%. Gas-turbine plants (F02C, 11.2%) and traffic control (G08G, 9.3%) trail behind, while data processing (G06F, 6.7%) and wireless networking (H04W, 5.7%) are the thinnest of the tracked classes.
Shares are the percentage of the 2,339 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Uncrewed Aircraft & Drones Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about uncrewed aircraft & drones patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative filing and most-cited records
Flight condition evaluation and protection for unmanned aerial vehicles and remotely-piloted vehicles (US10049583B2)
A framework for combining a weather risk analysis with appropriate operational rules includes a data initialization component, a rules processing component, and one or more weather risk analysis and assessment tools to evaluate a flight condition. The framework applies current, historical, predicted and forecasted weather data to operational rules governing a mission, payload, flight plan, craft type and location, generating advisories on mission compliance status and instructions for operation of unmanned aircraft.Filed by DTN, LLC and published 2018-08-14, this record ties weather-risk evaluation directly to flight-condition-based operational rules for unmanned aircraft.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20220126864A1 | Autonomous vehicle system | 680 |
| 2 | US20050004723A1 | Vehicle control system including related methods and components | 640 |
| 3 | US20140306799A1 | Vehicle Intruder Alert Detection and Indication | 527 |
| 4 | US20140310186A1 | Vehicle maintenance and warranty compliance detection | 446 |
| 5 | US5890441A | Horizontal and vertical take off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle | 418 |
| 6 | US20160236790A1 | System and methods for implementing regional air transit network using hybrid-electric aircraft | 395 |
| 7 | US20140306826A1 | Automatic communication of damage and health in detected vehicle incidents | 331 |
| 8 | US20150136897A1 | Aircraft, preferably unmanned | 302 |
| 9 | US9317983B2 | Automatic communication of damage and health in detected vehicle incidents | 300 |
| 10 | US20120209456A1 | Parallel Hybrid-Electric Propulsion Systems for Unmanned Aircraft | 276 |
Citation counts reflect influence within this searched corpus and skew toward older filings; they are not a measure of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three patterns stand out once concentration, technology composition and momentum are read together: dense occupation of the core airframe classes, a leadership tier that is pulling back rather than accelerating, and thinner coverage in the software layers that increasingly matter for autonomy.
A concentrated top tier, not a monopoly
The leading assignee holds 191 records and the top five combined account for 27.7% of all 2,339 records in scope, with the tenth-ranked filer already down to 33. That leaves most of the ranked field holding modest, defensible positions rather than broad blocking portfolios.
Airframe and helicopter claims are heavily occupied
B64C's 43.3% share and B64D's 24.4% show that structural and equipment claims sit on dense prior art. Filing density here signals occupied claim space, not that the underlying engineering problems are solved.
A real pullback among established filers
Filings dropped from 150 in 2021 to 89 in 2024, and several of the largest historical assignees show sharp year-on-year declines into the most recent tracked year. This reads as a genuine slowdown among incumbents rather than a publication-lag artefact, since 2024 is the last complete year in scope.
Collaboration is limited and inventor-anchored
Only ten co-assignee pairings appear across the dataset, and the strongest links pair a single corporate assignee with named individual inventors rather than two companies. Cross-company joint filing is not yet a meaningful feature of this field.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to uncrewed aircraft & drones patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Leading assignees and where they are pulling back
The ranked field is led by a cluster of aerospace primes and propulsion specialists, with a long tail of single- and double-digit filers behind them. Momentum data shows the largest historical filers now filing at a fraction of their prior pace, which opens room for newer entrants in adjacent, less-claimed branches.
The top-ranked assignee holds a commanding but not dominant share
At 191 records the leading assignee is well ahead of the field, but this still represents a fraction of the 2,339-record scope, leaving substantial room for differentiated claims elsewhere in the airframe and control stack.
Established filers are slowing sharply
Multiple assignees among the largest historical filers show year-on-year declines of -67% or filings dropping to zero in the latest tracked year. This pattern is consistent across several of the biggest names in the ranking, not isolated to one company.
Joint filing is rare and often inventor-linked
The strongest co-assignee relationships pair a corporate assignee with individually named inventors rather than another company, and the next-strongest pairing links two distinct corporate filers at a comparatively low count.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Raytheon Technologies | 3 | -67% |
| General Electric Co | 1 | -67% |
| Bell Helicopter Textron Inc | 0 | — |
| Textron Innovations Inc | 0 | -100% |
| The Boeing Co | 0 | -100% |
| AeroVironment Inc | 0 | — |
| Seiko Epson Corp | 0 | — |
| United Technologies Corp | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The figures above describe where filing has concentrated; deciding where to file next means testing a specific claim against this same corpus.
Stress-test a draft claim
Run a candidate claim in flight-condition evaluation, engine control or airframe sensing against the existing 2,339-record scope to see how it reads against the densest prior art clusters before drafting further.
Explore in Patsnap EurekaTrack the momentum shift
Several of the largest historical filers are pulling back sharply; monitoring whether that continues past 2024 helps decide whether to compete head-on or move toward the thinner wireless and traffic-control classes.
Explore in Patsnap EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
One assignee leads the ranked field with 191 records out of 2,339 in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 58 and tenth place at 33. The top five combined account for 27.7% of all records, so while the leader is dominant relative to individual competitors, most of the field's activity is spread across a long tail of smaller filers. This pattern is typical of aerospace hardware fields where legacy primes hold early positions but newer entrants keep adding narrower claims.
No — filings peaked in 2020 at 226 and declined to 89 by 2024, a 41% drop from the 2021 figure of 150, and 2024 is the last year in this dataset that can be treated as complete. Momentum data on individual assignees confirms the same pattern, with several of the largest historical filers showing year-on-year declines of around 67% or filing zero records in the latest tracked year. Figures for 2025 and 2026 will rise as publication catches up, since publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, but the underlying pullback through 2024 is real.
B64C, covering aeroplanes and helicopters, appears on 43.3% of the 2,339 records in scope, making it the single most heavily claimed class. B64D (aircraft equipment) follows at 24.4%, with the unmanned-vehicle-specific class B64U at 20.4% and non-electric control systems (G05D) at 18.3%. Because records can carry multiple IPC codes these shares add to more than 100%, but the ordering is a reasonably reliable guide to where claim space is most occupied.
The technology composition data shows comparatively thin coverage in wireless communication networks (H04W, 5.7% of records) and general data processing (G06F, 6.7%), relative to the dense 40%-plus coverage of core airframe classes. That gap suggests more room to claim multi-drone coordination, network-based traffic management and software-layer autonomy features than to claim structural or engine-control features directly. Co-assignee data also shows only ten cross-party filing relationships, indicating limited joint IP development in these adjacent software areas so far.
US10049583B2, assigned to DTN, LLC and published in 2018, covers a framework that combines weather-risk analysis with operational rules to evaluate flight conditions for unmanned and remotely-piloted aircraft, producing mission-compliance advisories and operating instructions. It sits at the intersection of flight-condition evaluation and autonomous operational decision-making, a combination that appears repeatedly in the dataset's IPC composition across B64U and G05D. Anyone building weather-aware autonomy or flight-advisory systems for UAVs should review its claim scope before finalising a similar approach.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.