Swarm

Saronic, a defense-technology company based in Austin, Texas, has announced the Corsair, its largest autonomous surface vessel yet. It's a 24-ft-long sleek ship with customizable capabilities that can be deployed in "the thousands" for the US Navy.

October 1 is China's National Day – and the high-tech metropolis of Shenzhen celebrated with an eye-popping spectacle: a record-smashing swarm display of 10,197 drones in concert, showing just how far this next-gen entertainment technology has come.

Puerto Rico-based Red Cat Holdings has announced what it believes is the first and only commercially available multi-drone swarm system, allowing several DoD-approved drones to perform co-ordinated tasks under the control of a single pilot.

Most robots are usually made to do one particular job, so they’re not very adaptable to new situations. But researchers at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell Universities have developed particle robots – simple circular devices that can connect to each other magnetically to move and work as a swarm.

Honda will be busy at CES 2019, showcasing several concepts and products related to vehicles and robotics. Among these is an interesting traffic safety system utilizing vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Honda is calling it Safe Swarm and its goal is to improve traffic flow and safety.

The ESA's Swarm satellites have found a strange system at work in the upper atmosphere. Electrical fields created as solar winds interact with the planet’s magnetic field have been found to drive supersonic plasma jets, which can heat the ionosphere to temperatures as high as 10,000º C (18,032º F).

The ESA is studying the Earth’s magnetic field, and now the project has discovered the driving force behind why it's changing: wrapped around the outer core of the planet is a geological “jet stream” made of molten iron, which flows at tremendous speeds – and it’s getting faster.

Robots need to avoid collisions. But if they're designed to be too careful, performance may suffer. A team has created new algorithms that aim to strike a balance between the two extremes, allowing robots to move in a swarm safely and efficiently.

Past research has found ways to steer a drone just through the power of the mind. Now, researchers at Arizona State University have built on that with a system that allows a pilot to take control of a whole swarm of drones, both in the air and on the ground.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has revealed that it has been conducting demonstrations of swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at various locations over the past month as part of the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) program.

The United States Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) is developing a fleet of robotic patrol boats that can not only act as escorts for larger warships or merchant vessels, but can also autonomously swarm around a threatening craft and destroy it.

Designed to scuttle around on distant planets looking for resources and material in much the same way that members of insect colonies do on Earth, groups of NASA robots dubbed 'swarmies' are being designed to survey an area together to break up tasks and act together to find and haul.