The robotic planes more commonly referred to as drones have gone from a secret, rarely covered military and CIA program to a regular fixture on the national media as well as technology websites.

As one of the leaders behind the U.S. drone program, White House adviser John Brennan, gets ready to face confirmation hearings to head the CIA, drones have never been more in the spotlight. Popular science show NOVA hopes to shed more light on these flying bots with a documentary titled "Rise of the Drones."

The documentary will tackle both the military and civilian side of drone technology, exploring how the military trains drone pilots at the Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico, as well as the role drones will play in domestic law enforcement.

There are controversies in both of these worlds. Are drone strikes in accordance with international law? Are they killing too many civilians? "We’ve entered an era where we’re conducting an array of operations using unmanned systems that in a previous generation we would have called war, and we would have treated like war," Peter W. Singer, an expert in the future of warfare, says in the documentary. "When you’re conducting more than 300 air strikes in a country, you’re conducting an equivalent of at least an ‘Air War’ campaign. But we don’t call it that now."

On the civilian side, most of the questions are related to privacy and security. Can citizens' privacy be respected when there are thousands of eyes in the sky? "I think anybody that can use a device to peer into your activities even if it’s the air outside your window or the air above your property, I think there is a right to privacy," Rep. Rand Paul tells NOVA. "The worry is that in two [to] three years we will have 30,000 drones crisscrossing the sky accumulating all this information."

In addition to Singer and Paul, to try to answer all these questions NOVA interviewed the "father" of the Predator drone, the most widely used killer drone in the U.S. arsenal, several drone pilots and Vijay Kumar, a University of Pennsylvania roboticist, particularly known for his studies in the control and coordination of multi-robot formations.

Check out the teaser trailer above to have an idea of what "Rise of the Drones" is all about. The full documentary will air Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on PBS

Photo courtesy of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.