AeroVironment, Inc. is an American technology company in Monrovia, California, and Simi Valley, California, that is primarily involved in energy systems, electric vehicle systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Paul B. MacCready, Jr., a designer of human-powered aircraft, founded the company in 1971. The company is probably most well known for developing a series of lightweight human-powered and then solar-powered vehicles. AeroVironment is the Pentagon's top supplier of small drones — including the Raven, Wasp and Puma models. They have signed a strategic partnership with Lockheed Martin Corp to develop their 'Global Observer' to provide "persistent airborne observation".

Among the vehicles the company built are:

AeroVironment holds a five-year, $4.7 million IDIQ (indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity) contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory for the development of advanced propulsion technologies for UAVs. The contract also provides for specific technological tasks such as integration of solar cells into aircraft wings, electric motor efficiency improvement technologies, and development of hydrogen storage systems for aircraft.

As a US-based provider of products and technology for clean energy and efficient vehicles, AeroVironment has received a United States patent for technology that facilitates the optimal charging, management, control and maintenance of battery packs, chargers and electric vehicles (EVs).

In 2013, AeroVironment participated in the DARPA TERN program, and received $2 million for Phase 1 and $19 million for Phase 2. The "Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node" program attempts to launch and recover a UAV from mid-size ships to provide long distance intelligence gathering. However, in September 2015 AeroVironment was not selected to move onto Phase 3 of the program.

AeroVironment offers a 240V home-charging station for electric vehicles. It is compatible with the SAE J1772 standard for level 2 charging. Nissan selected AeroVironment to supply this home charging station and installation services for the Nissan Leaf electric car. AeroVironment also sells level 3 high-voltage DC fast-charge stations compatible with the CHAdeMO standard that can charge a Think electric car to 80% in 15 minutes.

AeroVironment participates in various government and industry initiatives to create an electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

AeroVironment also sells the PosiCharge line of industrial electric vehicle charging systems for forklifts and other warehouse vehicles.

AeroVironment owns Skytower, Inc., which was formed in 2000 to develop the technologies and government approvals to use high altitude UAVs as "atmospheric satellites", or high altitude communications relay platforms.

In July 2002 the NASA/AeroVironment UAV Pathfinder Plus carried commercial communications relay equipment developed by Skytower in a test of using the aircraft as a broadcast platform. Skytower, in partnership with NASA and the Japan Ministry of Telecommunications, tested the concept of an "atmospheric satellite" by successfully using the aircraft to transmit both an HDTV signal as well as an IMT-2000 wireless communications signal from 65,000 feet (20,000 m), giving the aircraft the equivalence of a 12 miles (19 km) tall transmitter tower. Because of the aircraft's high lookdown angle, the transmission utilized only one watt of power, or 1/10,000 of the power required by a terrestrial tower to provide the same signal. According to Stuart Hindle, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for SkyTower, "SkyTower platforms are basically geostationary satellites without the time delay." Further, Hindle said that such platforms flying in the stratosphere, as opposed to actual satellites, can achieve much higher levels of frequency use. "A single SkyTower platform can provide over 1,000 times the fixed broadband local access capacity of a geostationary satellite using the same frequency band, on a bytes per second per square mile basis."