Netherlands takes inspiration from birds and bees to study drone swarms

Dutch scientists have launched the country’s first laboratory to study how autonomous micro-drones can mimic insects to perform tasks from finding factory gas leaks to search and rescue.

Researchers at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) said their goal is to form a “self-flying” aerial swarm of 100 micro-drones, allowing them to carry out missions around the clock.

These include the drone landing on its own on a charging bay and taking off again to continue flying – without any human involvement.

“Our work is about not only making these robots understand each other, but also making them work together to accomplish complex tasks,” said Guido de Croon, director of the Swarm Lab at TU Delft.

Missions include tiny drones (which weigh the same as a golf ball or egg) “sniffing out” gas leaks in factories.

A swarm of autonomous drones equipped with sensors to detect the gas will be able to fly autonomously around the factory until one drone detects traces of the gas.

It will then track the “smell” of the gas while “calling” other drones to assist in the search using their onboard sensors.

“Similarly, drone swarms could be used to detect forest fires or to continuously assist in search and rescue operations over large areas,” De Kron said.

“Observe Nature”

Scientists are using research on the behavior of bee and ant colonies or bird flocks to try to program drone swarms to do the same thing.

“The idea behind drone swarm technology is that when we look at nature, you see a lot of animals like ants that individually may not be that smart, but together they do… things that they absolutely could not do on their own,” DeCrown said.

“We want to give robots the same capabilities,” De Krohn said.

In this way, the scientists observed how birds or insects “use very simple behaviors” to gather in groups.

For example, birds “will look at their closest neighbor in the flock and react like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get too close,’ because they don’t want to collide,” DeCron said.

But “I also don’t want to be the only one who strays away from the herd.

“They align with each other. By following these simple rules you get these beautiful patterns that are very useful for birds and also as a defence against predators,” he told AFP.

“So at that level, we take inspiration and try to make such simple rules for the robot and then make them for the applications we want to solve.”

‘Complex systems’

But scientists acknowledge that some challenges remain.

“A swarm is a complex system,” said De Kloon as he demonstrated the technology in the Swarm Lab at TU Delft’s Science Center.

“Individual robots can do simple things in a swarm.”

“However, it is actually very difficult to predict the behavior of an entire bee colony using these simple rules,” DeCron said.

The robot’s small size also limits the amount of technology, such as sensors and onboard computing power, that a micro-drone can carry.

For now, Swarm Labs’ drones still rely on externally mounted cameras to relay information about their location within the swarm to the buzzing beasts.

But researchers have developed technology that allows robots to sense each other without any outside help.

And they’re not the first: In 2022, scientists at Zhejiang University in China successfully flew 10 autonomous drones through a dense bamboo forest.

Swarming Lab is currently working with Emergent, a startup founded by TU Delft alumni, to use around 40 small drones for research.

“Our ultimate goal is to have about 100 drones in the air within the next five years,” said Lennart Bult, co-founder of Emergent.

Ultimately, “it would be great if we could actually get closer to the amazing intelligence of tiny creatures like bees,” De Kloon said.