The rise of intelligent drone swarms

¹ Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) & Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier, France
² École Nationale de l’Aviation Civile, Université de Toulouse, France

Abstract

In Michael Crichton’s Prey [1], a cloud of nano-robots escapes human control and becomes something far more unsettling than a machine. It stretches, contracts, reorganizes, and even hunts. It behaves like a living swarm endowed with a form of collective intelligence, even though no single unit possesses a brain (see Striking image). The story was fiction, yet it captured an idea that has become increasingly important in complexity science. When many simple agents interact locally, complex and sometimes surprising behavior can emerge at the level of the group.