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.

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.