A well equipped drone is powerful enough an adversary on the battlefield, but there is strength in numbers as history suggests, which is why the military has managed to figure out a method of ensuring that a whole bunch of small drones can work together as a swarm, giving rise to the possibility that we might be looking at a digital horde of Zerg in the future. .S. Army tacticians are working on hundreds of these small drones to work in sync with one another.
The Targets Management Office has worked alongside the Program Executive Office for Simulation Training and Instrumentation to test “groups of quadcopters and octocopters” at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and at Fort Bliss in Texas, where it is meant to evaluate possible situations in the future where such a synchronized army of drones can be called upon to fulfill a military objective, or to act as a countermeasure itself against enemy synchronized drones.
Engineers are picking up these affordable consumer drones and working on a myriad of ways, and from different angles, to see just how far these can be modified before being put to use as a collective horde. The end game would be to coordinate dozens of drones or more into a single swarm, as theoretically speaking, a bunch of these can overwhelm a single defender, and the chances of a swarm of weaponized drones reaching their target are far higher than having a single, heavily armed drone. [Press Release]
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