Future applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) especially in military missions require the operation of UAVs with a high level of autonomy. Autonomous UAVs could be developed using agent technologies and therefore this paper investigates such an approach from an industrial perspective. Taking into account time, budget and available knowledge on the industrial side and need for UAV operators to understand the behavior of the autonomous system this paper proposes the application of cognitive agents and a design procedure that supports the transition of the pure operational requirements and functional specification into a cognitive agent system, called Operational driven development approach for Cognitive Systems(OpCog). Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent agents General Terms Design, Development process Keywords Agent-oriented software engineering, cognitive agents