How Multiple Drones Developed Collective Intelligence
A company has recently created new drone technology that allows multiple drones to be flown together without colliding. This autonomy makes them completely different from the drone shows you may have seen at the Super Bowl, Olympics, or recently at Intel’s 50th-anniversary celebration. Those drone shows may have had hundreds or even thousands of drones flying together, but the position and movement of all the drones was pre-programmed before the show began.
Whereas this new technology allows multiple drones to track their positions by sharing the information with the other drones simultaneously in real time. As all drones are in communication with other drones, they are aware of the other drones’ locations helping to prevent collisions.
This new technology was introduced a few years ago and was originally developed to work only with a few drones at a time. Now they are using up to 30 drones together with the potential to have thousands of drones flying together in the near future. However, this is not expected to be an easy task to accomplish. The more drones working together, the more complicated the system. Each drone must be in communication with the other drones at all times. A blast of wind can throw one of the drones off course, causing a chain reaction.
This new system was designed to anticipate all sorts of issues that could cause the drones to lose communication or fall off track. So far, the drones have performed beyond expectations in real world tests with no collisions reported and the developers plan to improve on the technology to allow more drones with better flight accuracy.
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