Applications

Drone Swarm

Drone Swarm is a group of unmanned aerial vehicles coordinating to accomplish a shared objective, using either centralized planning or decentralized control in which each vehicle acts on local sensing and neighbor communication. Research milestones include thousand-drone light shows with precomputed trajectories and decentralized swarms flying through forests, such as the Zhejiang University micro-swarm work published in 2022. Core problems include inter-agent collision avoidance, relative localization, and communication-constrained planning.

Why it matters for physical AI

Swarms trade individual capability for redundancy and coverage, a pattern relevant to warehouse fleets and inspection teams. Their decentralized coordination algorithms transfer to any multi-robot deployment operating under limited bandwidth.