Abstract
As drones expand their ability to perform longer and more complex tasks, one of the first concerns that rise is their capacity to perform those tasks in a reliable way. Reliability can be understood from different aspects: the ability of the drone to perform accurately, safely and autonomously. In this paper, we focus on understanding the current efforts to ensure the last quality, autonomy, from the point of view of energy-awareness for drone systems. It emerges that drones as object of study in energy aware Software Engineering is still an emerging, unexplored area, which requires to learn from advances and experimentation in other mobile and ubiquitous devices like cellular phones or tablets. Still, it is required to understand the opportunities and limitations of drones as computational targets. A research agenda should be set and followed to leverage software as an opportunity to foster drones as energy-aware devices.