concept
Drone Swarm Prototype
Prototype system for autonomous drone swarm coordination using decentralized consensus and local communication.
Robotics Embedded Swarm Intelligence
Vision
A fleet of lightweight drones that coordinate without a central controller. Each drone makes decisions based on its local perception and short-range communication with neighbors. The swarm as a whole performs tasks no individual drone could handle — area mapping, search and rescue, distributed sensing.
Technical architecture
- Hardware target: sub-250g quadcopters with onboard compute (ESP32 or similar)
- Communication: mesh network using ESP-NOW or LoRa for low-latency local messaging
- Navigation: GPS + visual odometry for outdoor, optical flow for indoor
- Coordination protocol: bio-inspired algorithms (ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization) adapted for real-time drone control
Research questions
- How much local information is sufficient for globally coherent behavior?
- What’s the minimum communication bandwidth needed for swarm coordination?
- How do you handle agent failure gracefully in a decentralized system?
Connection to BrainNet
Drone swarms are a physical testbed for multi-agent coordination theories. If BrainNet is the software protocol for shared intelligence, drone swarms are one of its first hardware instantiations.