Robot builds a robot's brain: AI generated drone command and control station hosted in the sky

Robot builds a robot's brain: AI generated drone command and control station hosted in the sky Abstract --Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) including large language models (LLMs) and hybrid reasoning models present an opportunity to reimagine how autonomous robots such as drones are designed, developed, and validated. Here, we demonstrate a fully AI-generated drone control system: with minimal human input, an artificial intelligence (AI) model authored all the code for a real-time, self-hosted drone command and control platform, which was deployed and demonstrated on a real drone in flight as well as a simulated virtual drone in the cloud. The system enables real-time mapping, flight telemetry, autonomous mission planning and execution, and safety protocols--all orchestrated through a web interface hosted directly on the drone itself. Not a single line of code was written by a human. We quantitatively benchmark system performance, code complexity, and development speed against prior, human-coded architectures, finding that AI-generated code can deliver functionally complete command-and-control stacks at orders-of-magnitude faster development cycles, though with identifiable current limitations related to specific model context window and reasoning depth. This work sets a precedent for the autonomous creation of robot control systems and, more broadly, suggests a new paradigm for robotics engineering--one in which future robots may be largely co-designed, developed, and verified by artificial intelligence. In this initial work, a robot built a robot's brain. INTRODUCTION In Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, the robots become self-aware and take over the world. In this paper, we take a first step in that direction: A robot (AI code writing machine) creates, from scratch, with minimal human input, the brain of another robot, a drone. Man vs. machine Legend has it that, in the 1870s, a human rail layer (John Henry) tried to beat a steam engine rail laying machine (robot) (Figure 1A). He died trying to beat the machine (robot). John Henry is an American legend and icon, similar to Johny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and George Washington. The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp of him in 1996. According to a folk song from 1918, later popularized by Disney, and still sung by American schoolchildren to this day, the American labor legend'John Henry was a mighty man, born with a hammer right in his hand' ( 1). Peter J. Burke is with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 USA (e-mail: pburke@uci.edu). In this work, we demonstrate a similar result in robot control software.