Crowd control

A major US research collaboration will investigate how wolf packs and shoals of fish could teach engineers to control swarms of unmanned vehicles.

The $5m (£2.6m) US military-funded project will develop complex algorithms that mimic group behaviour in nature. The research could allow one person to co-ordinate thousands of surveillance UAVs, ‘smart dust’ sensors or driverless vehicles.

Today’s unmanned robots need around 10 operators each, according to Prof Vijay Kumar, leading the research at the University of Pennsylvania. The Department of Defence-funded five-year programme also includes the Universities of California, Yale and MIT.

‘With complex systems like the robots repairing the Hubble telescope, that number grows,’ he said. ‘We want to reverse that ratio and have a hundred to a thousand units in a swarm controlled by a few people.’

A surveillance UAV swarm, for example, would be more effective and less vulnerable than one expensive aircraft, but today’s technology cannot simply be scaled up — the huge amount of data would be unmanageable for a ground crew.