Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), also known as the University of Budapest, is considered one of the most prestigious public institutions for higher education in Hungary. The university was founded in 1635 by Archbishop and theologian Péter Pázmány de Panasz. In 1949, 22 departments were integrated into the ELTE Faculty of Science, located at the Lágymányos Campus in Budapest’s 11th district, Újbuda. The Faculty is now comprised of five institutes: the Institute of Biology, the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Geography, the Institute of Chemistry, and the Institute of Mathematics.

Each institute within the ELTE Faculty of Science houses numerous departments. These departments have fostered the careers of some of the world’s most notable scientific minds. In recent years, the Department of Biological Physics at the Institute of Physics has made significant contributions to the drone industry. Founded in 1998, the department has become an unlikely source of drone technology development. Since 2009, Senior Research Fellow Gábor Vásárhelyi has served as the director of the department’s robotics laboratory, which focuses on how biological systems can influence the movements of robotic systems, such as drones.

Vásárhelyi explains that we can learn a great deal from how humans and animals move. For instance, a crowd of people walking through a busy street knows how to navigate in a complex manner to reach their destinations without colliding with others. Similarly, animals, such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, or colonies of insects, make countless instantaneous navigational decisions to move as individuals within a cohesive group. Vásárhelyi applies these biological physics principles to teach drones to navigate in a similar way.

Along with his mentor, Professor Emeritus Tamás Vicsek, Vásárhelyi and his team made international headlines in 2014 when they unveiled their work on autonomous drone swarms. As the drone industry continues to grow, such research is more important than ever. Today, Vásárhelyi and his team have progressed from introducing a flock of 10 autonomous drones to a swarm of 100 fully autonomous drones that make instantaneous navigational decisions, similar to biological subjects like humans, birds, fish, and insects.

Boldizsár Balázs, a research assistant at the robotics lab, describes the key to autonomous drone flocks as decentralized traffic management. “Our algorithm for decentralized traffic management combines real-time pass planning and bio-inspired sense and avoid methods,” he says. “We design our solution to handle different velocities and priorities between the agents as well as using the third dimension by stacking planner layers of traffic upon each other.” To prove the theory, Balázs explains that they first tested it in a virtual simulator, which was able to manage up to 5,000 drones flying autonomously within a preset environment that included obstacles.

Each drone has an onboard system that guides its actions, just as a human’s or animal’s brain directs its behavior. “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,” said Vásárhelyi. “The drones will be able to do what they have to do just by communicating to each other.” After testing in the virtual simulator, the team was ready to run an experiment with actual drones. They programmed more than 100 drones to navigate as an autonomous swarm in a real-life traffic environment. All of the drones continuously communicate with each other, enabling fully scalable navigational autonomy.

In 2015, as a spinoff from the university’s robotics lab, Vásárhelyi founded CollMot (short for Collective Motion) to further test drones in real-world scenarios. One of the most obvious applications for autonomous drone swarms is the creation of drone light shows, a specialty of CollMot. But as Vásárhelyi points out, this is just one of many potential uses for autonomous decentralized drone traffic management. “The traffic solution we have shown here has a very widespread application potential,” he said. “Such a system can serve smart cities, drone taxi, or drone delivery networks, or search and rescue operations, or any other application where the safe coordination of autonomous vehicles is a requirement.”

The groundbreaking work being done at ETLE, particularly in the field of autonomous drone swarms, showcases the incredible potential of interdisciplinary research. By drawing inspiration from the natural world and applying biological principles to robotics, the team led by Vásárhelyi is not only advancing drone technology but also paving the way for a future where autonomous systems can operate safely and efficiently in complex environments.

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