AI-Driven Drone Swarms: From Distributed Intelligence to Real-World Deployment
A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Robotics and Automation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2027 | Viewed by 212
Editor
Interests: mechatronics; parallel robots; robot programming; design of mechatronic systems; CAD; CAM; mechanisms and dynamics of machines; modelling and simulation; MATLAB/Simulink; VR; optimization; genetic algorithms
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue focuses on the latest advances in artificial intelligence techniques enabling autonomous, collaborative drone swarms and their transition from theoretical frameworks to real-world deployment. Drone swarms represent a paradigm shift in aerial robotics, leveraging distributed intelligence where multiple UAVs operate without centralized control, using local sensing, communication, and decision-making to achieve complex collective behaviors.
Recent progress in edge AI, distributed machine learning, and multi-agent coordination has significantly enhanced swarm autonomy, scalability, and robustness, allowing deployment in dynamic and uncertain environments such as disaster response, precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and defense applications. Emerging architectures integrating edge–cloud computing and agentic AI further enable real-time reasoning, adaptive mission planning, and resilient swarm coordination in mission-critical scenarios.
Despite these advances, several challenges remain for real-world adoption, including communication constraints, energy efficiency, safety, regulatory compliance, and trustworthiness. Additionally, bridging the gap between simulation and deployment requires robust validation frameworks, standardized testbeds, and scalable hardware-software co-design approaches.
This Special Issue aims to bring together interdisciplinary contributions that address the full lifecycle of AI-driven drone swarms—from algorithmic foundations and distributed intelligence models to system integration, real-world experimentation, and industrial applications. Contributions exploring novel architectures, learning paradigms, swarm control strategies, human–swarm interaction, and ethical considerations are particularly encouraged.
Dr. Sergiu Dan Stan
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- drone swarms
- distributed intelligence
- multi-agent systems
- swarm intelligence
- edge AI/edge computing
- autonomous UAV systems
- reinforcement learning
- real-world deployment
- human–swarm interaction
- cooperative robotics
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