Nowadays robotic platforms can autonomously take decisions to face with unpredictable obstacles and challenges related with a chaotic environment. Recent techniques in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) yield to outstanding visual applications yet available to the big audience. Cameras can be used as stand-alone or complementary sensors to enable higher degree of autonomy. The tradeoff between dedicated hardware resources (AI accelerators) computational power and software architectures complexity demand is a current filed of research, which we walked through during the development of a real-time visual "drone detector". During the presentation, we will also share our experience with AI in aerospace industry.