Drone swarms

Drones that cooperate autonomously, without human control at every step, open entirely new possibilities! Autonomous drone swarms represent a rapidly emerging technological domain where multiple airborne platforms interact through distributed perception, communication, and decision-making. The technology holds great potential but also imposes high demands on safety, transparency, and the ability to maintain human oversight.

When many drones make decisions together in real time, a new set of security challenges arises: Systems must handle uncertainty, interference, and cybersecurity threats while ensuring robust communication and that swarm behaviour can be understood and explained. In addition, clear regulatory models are needed for autonomous systems acting collectively in complex societal contexts, while keeping humans in control.

Drone swarms at RISE

RISE works on everything from fundamental algorithms to normative and practical application issues:

• Technical methods and algorithms
  Development of algorithms, sensor usage, robust communication, and drone detection. We also work with simulation environments to analyse system behaviour.
• Human–autonomous system interaction
  Design of interfaces and control models that enable meaningful human control. The focus is on creating systems where users can understand, predict, and influence swarm behaviour.
• Regulation, policy, and ethics
  Analysis of legal frameworks such as U-space, safety requirements, and responsibility allocation related to autonomous collectives. We develop methods for risk analysis and ethical evaluation of swarm-based systems in civilian and critical applications.
• Experimental testing and validation
  RISE operates testbeds, simulation platforms, and field experiments where real drone swarms are tested under controlled conditions: from radio and sensor evaluation to system-level autonomy and safety tests.

RISE is working to develop next-generation drone swarms to support Swedish industry in several key segments, such as transport and logistics, energy and infrastructure, agriculture and forestry, defence and security, as well as rescue and societal preparedness. By combining research, test environments, and broad engineering expertise, we help create safe, reliable, and scalable solutions that enable technological breakthroughs while ensuring responsible and practical use in critical applications.

Autonomous drone swarms are already in use today, and research points to even broader future potential. Examples include:

• Emergency services
  Coordinated search and mapping during forest fires, building collapses, or major accidents. Swarms can quickly divide areas, identify heat sources, and provide real-time data to incident commanders.
• Sea rescue
  Distributed searching over large ocean areas where multiple drones can simultaneously follow different patterns, share sensor data, and quickly locate people or objects in the water.
• Agriculture and forestry
  Joint measurement of crop health, damage, water conditions, and pests through parallel flights. In forestry, swarms enable rapid storm damage mapping and inventory of large areas.
• Infrastructure inspection
  Multi-drone systems can inspect bridges, power lines, tunnels, and industrial facilities much faster than single drones, while redundancy increases safety.
• Transport and logistics
  Collaborating drones can plan routes, share loads, or act as a collective transport network in both commercial and critical delivery chains. This includes, for example, medical transports, spare parts, or time-sensitive samples.
• Defence and defence-related applications
  Focus on robust communication, redundancy, decentralized autonomy, cyber resilience, and operations in environments with interference and limited GPS availability. Emphasis is placed on technical requirements, secure methodology, and resilience.
• Societal preparedness
  Drone swarms can support situational awareness, rapid damage assessment, infrastructure mapping, flood monitoring, and resource coordination during major events.