If drones are to take over any of the many tasks they should undertake, they will have to become smarter - and learn to cooperate. In the demonstration of these two events, Chinese researchers showed a group of UAVs sailing in a dense forest they had never encountered.
Although you've seen drone swarms before - in fact, it goes back a long time, but although they are usually well coordinated, they are not collectively autonomous. In other words, although they fly in an adjustable formation and avoid obstacles, their trajectory is controlled by a central computer, which is responsible for monitoring the position of the former and issuing instructions.
Without any central organization function, it will be very useful to have UAVs that can coordinate their movement with each other. However, this is difficult to achieve because most of the sensor and computing resources required to quickly and effectively perceive and respond to the environment are not conducive to the agility required to do so.
However, researchers at Zhejiang University have successfully created a swarm of 10 drones, which are intelligent enough to fly autonomously through dense and unfamiliar forests, and they are small and light enough that each can be easily parked in the palm of a person's hand. This is a big step towards using such colonies for aerial measurement and disaster response.
Based on the off the shelf design of subminiature UAVs, the team has established a trajectory planner for this group, which completely depends on the data from the airborne sensors of the bee colony, which process the data locally and share it with each other. UAVs can balance or be guided to pursue various goals, such as keeping a certain distance from obstacles or each other, or minimizing the total flight time between two points, and so on.
However, it is worrying that these UAVs can also be given tasks similar to "tracking a human". I believe you have seen some movies and know how it works But it can also be useful in rescue or combat situations.
It is reported that part of UAV swarm navigation involves drawing the world around them. The paper provides some cool looking 3D displays of the environment in which the swarm is sent.
