[Autonomous drones ready to take off]
[A swarm of 100 quadcopters flying autonomously for the first time during an experiment]
[Researcher, Gábor Vásárhelyi pushing away a drone stand]
[Researchers checking the propellers of a quadcopter]
Gábor Vásárhelyi (interview): “We don’t scale up our systems from designing one single drone and then having multiple ones. But we start this whole thing with the mindset of collective motion and collective behaviour.”
[Researchers testing a quadcopter]
Gábor Vásárhelyi (interview): “We can make the drones autonomous enough to communicate with each other without any human control or central computer, using some kind of global information processing. And this is the level of what we call de-centralization or decentralized systems. After the drones are told what to do, we can switch off the ground control station, we can burn it, or whatever, throw it away, and the drones will be able to do what they have to do just by communicating to each other.”
[A drone]
[Researchers working on a quadcopter in the lab]
Gábor Vásárhelyi (interview): “We started this whole process of developing coordinated algorithms ten years ago with these fully equal drones. And then, as we started to raise the number of drones in the same system, we reached the limits of this ‘democratic behavior’. And it turned out that if there are more than 30 drones, let’s say, or 50, you cannot have a fully ‘democratic voting’ for example (about) a direction where to go because the system just becomes too large.”
[Simulations showing different numbers of drones flying together autonomously]
[A swarm of 100 quadcopters flying autonomously during an experiment]
Boldizsár Balázs (interview): “We’ve achieved 100 real drones in the sky; they can fly together, and it’s all working. But now we also have a simulation framework that has proven to be an absolutely good representation of reality. And in that framework, our new algorithm is capable of driving up to 5000 drones without any collisions and solving all the tasks they are assigned to.”
[Researchers looking at the computer simulation of 5000 drones flying autonomously]
[A computer screen showing the simulation]
Researchers talking]
Gábor Vásárhelyi (interview): “We have temporary leaders in the flock when they go together. And those who have reliable information, they have a larger weight in the ‘voting’ process. And so they will be momentary leaders of the flock, and then they can tell the others: ‘wait, there is a danger here, we should turn’, and then the whole flock turns. And then there will be others who will be the leaders when there is a next obstacle.”
[A swarm of 100 quadcopters flying autonomously for the first time during an experiment]
Gábor Vásárhelyi (interview): “We are trying to apply this kind of collective behavior knowledge to many different systems. For example, we are developing, with partners, spraying drones. So, in precision agriculture will be able to do it with multiple drones in parallel to speed up the process. Obviously, military applications…military forces are very interested in all kinds of defense or attack possibilities when there is not a single unit, but multiple units can sense things in a distributed way or have a very redundant system in which if they take out one drone, the rest can still follow the mission, etcetera. There are very interesting, distributed sensing applications in meteorology or for air pollution, etcetera.”
[Gábor Vásárhelyi working in the drone lab]
[Gábor Vásárhelyi soldering a quadcopter’s circuit board]
[A drone]
[Researchers testing a quadcopter in the lab]
Boldizsár Balázs (interview): “It’s very rare that you see some technology and you say it’s beautiful. Even if it’s poor high-tech technology, it needs to be designed by nature or something that resembles nature. And this one in its core, in its theoretical core, resembles nature. And that’s why the drones themselves don’t need to be pretty. But what they do is pretty because it resembles the natural swarming behavior.”
[Autonomous drones before a drone show]
[Drone flock taking off]
[Bystanders]
[Flock of autonomous drones flying over the river Danube]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.