In a scene straight out of science fiction, researchers at China’s Zhejiang University have unleashed a swarm of ten drones into a dense bamboo forest. The palm-sized drones navigate the cluttered, GPS-denied environment with a spooky, fish-like coordination, relying only on onboard cameras and a clever decentralized algorithm to avoid collisions with trees and each other. This marks one of the first times a drone swarm has successfully flown in a complex, unstructured outdoor environment without any prior mapping or human pilots, pointing toward a future of autonomous robots for disaster relief and reconnaissance.
