Cross-disciplinary approaches for designing intelligent swarms of drones

The idea of preparing a special issue of the Swarm Intelligence journal dedicated to the distributed control and adaptive collective behavior in swarms of drones has emerged after a workshop on this topic held in Toulouse on November 13–14, 2017. This workshop was intended to promote an interdisciplinary approach of collective behavior both in swarms of drones and in natural systems like fish schools or flocks of birds and also to favor cross-disciplinary interactions between various communities: quantitative and computational ethology, computer science, information technologies, swarm robotics and statistical physics. The workshop took place at the Université Toulouse 1 Capitole and was supported by The Fondation de Coopération Scientifique Sciences et Technologies pour l’Aéronautique et l’Espace, the National School of Civil Aviation (ENAC), the Toulouse Institute for Complex Systems Studies, the Toulouse Institute of Computer Science Research and the Research Center on Animal Cognition.
Designing swarms of autonomous mini or micro-drones able to self-organize, sense their environment, coordinate their movements, and cooperate to perform collective tasks in real-world situations is a major challenge in swarm robotics. This problem has been tackled from different perspectives in many research fields that often follow different strategies and objectives..