It's entirely possible (and in fact would be a very fun hobby project for me some day) to build a hybrid autonomous drone (via GPS, gyro, accelerometer, compass, range finders, etc) that takes a queue of commands or even little high level command scripts and executes them. Video would be stored locally as well as broadcast back in real-time, in case of jamming attempt.

Edit: Apparently, according to other commenters, there are already open-source autonomous quad-copters you can hack on, which is great news to me! (And you can buy the hardware preassembled).