“Individual Vehicles Self Assemble, Co-ordinate and Take Flight” – Into the Mind of the Swarm

Swarm intelligence has featured in science fiction since the 1930′s, with Olaf Stapleton’s Martian cells (able to communicate via radio waves) in The Last and First Men(1931).  He re-visited the concept in his 1937 book ‘Star Maker‘.  This is territory more recently explored by Stanislaw Lem with ‘The Invincible‘ (1964), and in Michael Crichton’s 2002 novel ‘Prey‘.

Circulating on the web this week are videos from the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (Zurich), who’s Distributed Flight Array demonstrates just how credible the idea of an artificial, autonomous, swarm based, intelligence actually is:

“The individual vehicles of the Distributed Flight Array have fixed propellers that can lift them into the air, but the resulting flight is erratic and uncontrolled. Joined together, however, these relatively simple modules evolve into a sophisticated multi-propeller system capable of coordinated flight. The task of keeping the array in level flight is distributed across the network of vehicles. Vehicles exchange information and combine this information with their own sensor measurements to determine how much thrust is needed for the array to take-off and maintain level flight. If the array’s leveled flight is disturbed, each vehicle individually determines the amount of thrust required to correct for the disturbance based on its position in the array and the array’s motion.”

And Yet It Moves – Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control