U.S. military officials have announced that they’ve carried out their largest ever test of a drone swarm released from fighter jets in flight. In the trials, three F/A-18 Super Hornets released 103 Perdix drones, which then communicated with each other and went about performing a series of formation flying exercises that mimic a surveillance mission.
But the swarm doesn’t know how, exactly, it will perform the task before it’s released. As William Roper of the Department of Defense explained…
Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature. Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.
They’re not required to behave like human sheeple. Should we worry?
Just in case you wondered what that sound was over the National Mall in DC on Saturday.
“So, You Want to Take Out a Drone Swarm : The Russian military looks to countermeasures and electronic warfare as the U.S. military develops robotic swarms” https://warisboring.com/so-you-want-to-take-out-a-drone-swarm-e423ff57cf4d#.76cxi2lid
Meanwhile the U.S. DoD Strategic Capabilities Office (SOC) has said its goal is to scale the size of the swarms to batches of up to 1,000.
“MIT Grooms Tomorrow’s AI Developers by Making Them Battle Each Other” https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mit-grooms-tomorrows-ai-developers-by-making-them-battle-each-other
“Approaching to autonomous controlling swarm of UAVs : Researchers have developed a new technique to achieve tight formation control of UAVs” (Science China Information Sciences 7/23/17) https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/scp-ata072317.php