The Pentagon successfully tested a swarm of 103 drone

The US Army is developing a fundamentally new type of armed forces - detachments of unmanned aerial vehicles with swarm intelligence . In October 2016, successful tests of the world's largest swarm of microdrones, consisting of 103 Perdix devices, were held, according to the US Department of Defense website.

Swarm intelligence involves the coordinated actions of a large number of agents (boids) who interact locally with themselves and the environment. Although each Boid follows simple basic rules, but in aggregate, the system of swarm intelligence demonstrates extremely complex joint behavior. It actually acts as a single large organism.

For example, in the final episode of the last season of the Black Mirror, they demonstrated a typical system of swarm intelligence from robotic bees, which had to replace an extinct population of living bees. So, having received a simple command to get to the goal in the inner ear of a girl, which, according to the results of voting on Twitter, the people recognized the most hated girl for the day, robots, bees showed different ways to achieve it. Some tried to break through the window, others through the door, and others through ventilation. This is not because bees are so smart and inventive. Quite the contrary, they acted extremely primitively, following a basic set of simple rules. They tried all the options, stupidly poking in all the cracks. This well demonstrates the principle of a complex system behavior based on simple rules.
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The mobile sculpture of the robochance in the office of the developer. Photo: the series "Black Mirror"

Since the swarm of robotic bees received one task, it seemed as if they were being guided by some invisible force. Although in reality each drone was autonomous and was guided by a simple set of basic rules.

By the way, engineers from Harvard University helped cinemasters in the development of the robber from the “Black Mirror”.

Drones of the US Department of Defense are much less advanced than in the movies. And when the military calls them with the prefix "micro", it can only cause a smile. Maybe in the dictionary you need to add a new definition to the word "micro"?


Perdix micron

Technical characteristics of devices:
Propellers : 6.6 cm
Body : 16.5 cm
Wingspan : 30.0 cm
Weight : 290 g
Flight time : more than 20 minutes
Maximum speed : more than 40-60 knots (74-111 km / h)

Perdix - in Greek mythology, the nephew and disciple of Daedalus.

The drone swarm system was developed by the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) of the US Department of Defense, in collaboration with the Naval Air Systems Command. The vehicles were launched into the air from three deck-mounted fighter-bomber F / A-18E / F Super Hornet.

During the tests, a group of drones demonstrated a number of unique capabilities of the swarm formation, including collective decision making, adaptive changes of the system on the fly, and the group’s “self-healing”.

Each of the Boids in the American Army’s swarm system maintained contact with other Boids. There is no leader or commander, which allows the swarm to successfully survive the loss of individual Boids and continue coordinated actions.

According to the military leadership, such groups of cheap disposable Boids are able to effectively carry out complex missions, for which large, expensive vehicles are now being used. In addition, there is no need for continuous management by the person. People may withdraw from such autonomous systems. In the absence of a person, they act much more efficiently, because they make decisions faster and react instantly to external factors.


Perdix is ​​a cheap, lightweight drone whose body is printed on a 3D printer. The drones themselves were originally created by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then adapted for military use by scientists and engineers from the Lincoln laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Lincoln Laboratory). Work has been going on since 2013. Since then, Perdix software and hardware configurations have been constantly improving: now this is the 6th generation of drones. In the future, the system upgrade will continue.

Tests have proven the performance of drones after transportation at a speed of 0.6 Mach at a temperature of −10 ° C, as well as after shocks due to the shooting of IR traps from fighters.

In the characteristics of Perdix it is indicated that this is a drone for reconnaissance missions, but the use of swarm intelligence greatly expands the functionality of this device. It is not difficult to imagine how a swarm of such drones armed with explosive ammunition (for example, grenades) performs combat missions.

The use of armed drones on the battlefield is designed to reduce losses in manpower, but at the same time creates additional risks. In February 2016, experts published a report warning of an increased risk of erroneous shelling when using autonomous weapons: “This may happen due to hackers' actions, manipulations of the drone’s behavior by the enemy, unexpected interactions with the environment security, ”writes Paul Scharre from the Center for New American Security, one of the authors of the report. “Moreover, as the complexity of the systems increases, it becomes more difficult to test the behavior of the system in all possible conditions; the number of potential interactions between the system and the environment is simply too large. "

Human Rights Watch calls for the signing of an international agreement that would proactively ban the development, production and use of autonomous weapons.