The specialized crops could save farmers millions. A swarm of desert locusts fly after an aircraft sprayed pesticide in Meru, Kenya in 2021. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Swarms of locusts devouring a farmer's livelihood might sound apocalyptic, but major locust infestations are a regular problem in agricultural communities around the world. These locust swarms--dense, droning packs of certain grasshopper species--can cover hundreds of square miles, and the insects consume vast amounts of vegetation and threaten global agriculture.

Predictions that AI bot swarms were a threat to democracy weren't'fanciful', said Michael Wooldridge, professor of the foundations of AI at Oxford University. Predictions that AI bot swarms were a threat to democracy weren't'fanciful', said Michael Wooldridge, professor of the foundations of AI at Oxford University. Experts warn of threat to democracy from'AI bot swarms' infesting social media Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned. The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new "disruptive threat" posed by hard-to-detect, malicious "AI swarms" infesting social media and messaging channels. A would-be autocrat could use such swarms to persuade populations to accept cancelled elections or overturn results, they said, amid predictions the technology could be deployed at scale by the time of the US presidential election in 2028.

Advances in artificial intelligence are creating a perfect storm for those seeking to spread disinformation at unprecedented speed and scale. And it's virtually impossible to detect. In 2016, hundreds of Russians filed into a modern office building on 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg every day; they were part of the now-infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency . Day and night, seven days a week, these employees would manually comment on news articles, post on Facebook and Twitter, and generally seek to rile up Americans about the then-upcoming presidential election. When the scheme was finally uncovered, there was widespread media coverage and Senate hearings, and social media platforms made changes in the way they verified users.

Abstract-- This paper presents a UA V swarm system designed to assist first responders in disaster scenarios like wildfires. By distributing sensors across multiple agents, the system extends flight duration and enhances data availability, reducing the risk of mission failure due to collisions. T o mitigate this risk further, we introduce an autonomous navigation framework that utilizes a local Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) map for obstacle avoidance while maintaining swarm formation with minimal path deviation. Additionally, we incorporate a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) variant to optimize area coverage, prioritizing Points of Interest (POIs) based on preas-signed values derived from environmental behavior and critical infrastructure. The proposed system is validated through simulations with varying swarm sizes, demonstrating its ability to maximize coverage while ensuring collision avoidance between UA Vs and obstacles.

Abstract-- Human-swarm interaction (HSI) is an active research challenge in the realms of swarm robotics and human-factors engineering. Here we apply a cognitive systems engineering perspective and introduce a neuro-inspired joint-systems theory of HSI. The mindset defines predictions for adaptive, robust and scalable HSI dynamics and therefore has the potential to inform human-swarm loop design. For the real world application of swarm robotics, human operators are required to be part of the system loop. Reasons are (1) the swarm's inability to achieve mission goals independently [1], (2) human out of loop phenomena [2] as well as (3) legal and ethical concerns [3].

Foundation models have rapidly advanced AI, raising the question of whether their decisions will ultimately surpass human strategies in real-world domains. The exponential, and possibly super-exponential, pace of AI development makes such analysis elusive. Nevertheless, many application areas that matter for daily life and society show only modest gains so far; a prominent case is diagnosing and treating dynamically evolving disease in intensive care. The common challenge is adapting complex systems to dynamic environments. Effective strategies must optimize outcomes in systems composed of strongly interacting functions while avoiding shared side effects; this requires reliable, self-adaptive modeling. These tasks align with building digital twins of highly complex systems whose mechanisms are not fully or quantitatively understood. It is therefore essential to develop methods for self-adapting AI models with minimal data and limited mechanistic knowledge. As this challenge extends beyond medicine, AI should demonstrate clear superiority in these settings before assuming broader decision-making roles. We identify the curse of dimensionality as a fundamental barrier to efficient self-adaptation and argue that monolithic foundation models face conceptual limits in overcoming it. As an alternative, we propose a decentralized architecture of interacting small agent networks (SANs). We focus on agents representing the specialized substructure of the system, where each agent covers only a subset of the full system functions. Drawing on mathematical results on the learning behavior of SANs and evidence from existing applications, we argue that swarm-learning in diverse swarms can enable self-adaptive SANs to deliver superior decision-making in dynamic environments compared with monolithic foundation models, though at the cost of reduced reproducibility in detail.

Abstract--Autonomous aerial tracking with drones offers vast potential for surveillance, cinematography, and industrial inspection applications. While single-drone tracking systems have been extensively studied, swarm-based target tracking remains underexplored, despite its unique advantages of distributed perception, fault-tolerant redundancy, and multidirectional target coverage. T o bridge this gap, we propose a novel decentralized LiDAR-based swarm tracking framework that enables visibility-aware, cooperative target tracking in complex environments, while fully harnessing the unique capabilities of swarm systems. T o address visibility, we introduce a novel Spherical Signed Distance Field (SSDF)-based metric for 3-D environmental occlusion representation, coupled with an efficient algorithm that enables real-time onboard SSDF updating. A general Field-of-View (FOV) alignment cost supporting heterogeneous LiDAR configurations is proposed for consistent target observation. These innovations are integrated into a hierarchical planner, combining a kinodynamic front-end searcher with a spatiotemporal SE(3) back-end optimizer to generate collision-free, visibility-optimized trajectories. The proposed approach undergoes thorough evaluation through comprehensive benchmark comparisons and ablation studies. Deployed on heterogeneous LiDAR swarms, our fully decentralized implementation features collaborative perception, distributed planning, and dynamic swarm reconfigurability. V alidated through rigorous real-world experiments in cluttered outdoor environments, the proposed system demonstrates robust cooperative tracking of agile targets (drones, humans) while achieving superior visibility maintenance. This work establishes a systematic solution for swarm-based target tracking, and its source code will be released to benefit the community. Recent studies highlight the unique suitability of UA Vs for tracking dynamic targets in complex environments, owing to their highly agile three-dimensional (3-D) maneuverability. While substantial progress has been made in single-UA V tracking, the swarm-based aerial tracking remains underexplored. The authors are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. X. Lyu is with the School of Intelligent System Engineering, Sun Y at-sen University, Shenzhen, China. A swarm of four autonomous drones is cooperatively tracking a human runner using heterogeneous LiDAR configurations. The LiDAR setup consists of one upward-facing Mid360 LiDAR (marked by blue dashed lines), one downward-facing Mid360 LiDAR (green dashed lines), and two Avia LiDARs (red dashed lines). The swarm forms a 3-D distribution to track the target, with each tracker positioned optimally to suit its FOV settings. Effective agile aerial tracking with autonomous swarms primarily relies on three criteria: visibility, coordination, and portability.

Abstract-- Effective collective decision-making in swarm robotics often requires balancing exploration, communication and individual uncertainty estimation, especially in hazardous environments where direct measurements are limited or costly. We propose a decentralized Bayesian framework that enables a swarm of simple robots to identify the safer of two areas, each characterized by an unknown rate of hazardous events governed by a Poisson process. Robots employ a conjugate prior to gradually predict the times between events and derive confidence estimates to adapt their behavior . Our simulation results show that the robot swarm consistently chooses the correct area while reducing exposure to hazardous events by being sample-efficient. Compared to baseline heuristics, our proposed approach shows better performance in terms of safety and speed of convergence. The proposed scenario has potential to extend the current set of benchmarks in collective decision-making and our method has applications in adaptive risk-aware sampling and exploration in hazardous, dynamic environments. Collective decision-making under uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in multi-robot systems, including domains such as collective perception, environment classification, and spatial consensus [1]-[4]. Decentralized systems (e.g., robot swarms) operate under strict limitations on sensing, communication, and memory. Instead of sharing/storing complete observation histories, robots must maintain compact model representations of their knowledge. It is crucial to develop efficient strategies for collective decision-making, especially when observations are sparse, noisy [5], and gathered from stochastic processes [6]. This is typically characterized as a best-of-n problem [3], [7].

The rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their applications in diverse domains, such as surveillance, disaster management, agriculture, and defense, have revolutionized modern technology. While the potential benefits of swarm-based UAV networks are growing significantly, they are vulnerable to various security attacks that can jeopardize the overall mission success by degrading their performance, disrupting decision-making, and compromising the trajectory planning process. The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) plays a vital role in identifying potential security attacks to ensure the secure operation of UAV swarm networks. However, conventional IDS primarily focuses on binary classification with resource-intensive neural networks and faces challenges, including latency, privacy breaches, increased performance overhead, and model drift. This research aims to address these challenges by developing a novel lightweight and federated continuous learning-based IDS scheme. Our proposed model facilitates decentralized training across diverse UAV swarms to ensure data heterogeneity and privacy. The performance evaluation of our model demonstrates significant improvements, with classification accuracies of 99.45% on UKM-IDS, 99.99% on UAV-IDS, 96.85% on TLM-UAV dataset, and 98.05% on Cyber-Physical datasets.

Large-scale disaster Search And Rescue (SAR) operations are persistently challenged by complex terrain and disrupted communications. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms offer a promising solution for tasks like wide-area search and supply delivery, yet their effective coordination places a significant cognitive burden on human operators. The core human-machine collaboration bottleneck lies in the ``intention-to-action gap'', which is an error-prone process of translating a high-level rescue objective into a low-level swarm command under high intensity and pressure. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a novel LLM-CRF system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to model and augment human-swarm teaming cognition. The proposed framework initially captures the operator's intention through natural and multi-modal interactions with the device via voice or graphical annotations. It then employs the LLM as a cognitive engine to perform intention comprehension, hierarchical task decomposition, and mission planning for the UAV swarm. This closed-loop framework enables the swarm to act as a proactive partner, providing active feedback in real-time while reducing the need for manual monitoring and control, which considerably advances the efficacy of the SAR task. We evaluate the proposed framework in a simulated SAR scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional order and command-based interfaces, the proposed LLM-driven approach reduced task completion time by approximately $64.2\%$ and improved task success rate by $7\%$. It also leads to a considerable reduction in subjective cognitive workload, with NASA-TLX scores dropping by $42.9\%$. This work establishes the potential of LLMs to create more intuitive and effective human-swarm collaborations in high-stakes scenarios.