Creating a swarm of autonomous drones by studying animal patterns [Video]

Moving in a dense cloud, like throngs of people walking across a crowded public square, 100 drones maneuver through the night sky in Hungary’s capital, the result of over a decade of research and experimentation that scientists believe could change the future of unmanned flight.

The behavior of the swarm, made up of autonomous drones that make their own real-time decisions on collision avoidance and trajectory planning without pre-programming or centralized control, is guided by research the Hungarian scientists performed on the collective movements of creatures from the natural world.

“It’s very rare that you see some technology and you say it’s beautiful,” said Boldizsár Balázs, one of the researchers working on the project. “In its theoretical core it resembles nature. That’s why the drones themselves don’t need to be pretty, but what they do is pretty because it resembles natural swarming behavior.”

Drones have in recent years become a …