SWARMING TREND A PLAGUE OF HYPERBOLE

摘要

look at all the pretty drones. Hovering above sports stadiums from Houston to Pyeongchang, many hundreds of them have lately sparkled in artful murmuration. On a recent Time magazine cover, 958 drones pixelated the sky. The world record, 1,374 LED-bedazzled microbots, was set by Chinese company EHang UAV in May. So-called drone swarms-the phrase people have taken up with gusto-are having their biggest, buzziest year ever. It's an evocative word, swarms, and innocuous enough when applied to one of Intel's drone light shows. But it's tinged with alarm-if drones can dance at twilight, they can also attack. Sure enough, a gang outside Denver sent a small fleet to harass FBI agents on a raid earlier this year. In Syria, rebels reportedly sicced a squadron of quadrotors on a Russian base. To the media, both events were swarms. Take comfort,then, in this buzzkill: "The swarm is really an illusion," says Mac Schwager, an assistant professor at Stanford who studies multi-robot systems. Schwager, along with many of his colleagues, resists the word. Too entomological, conjuring as it does frillions of bugs surging as a single superorganism through the air. (Flocking birds, in fact, were the field's original inspiration-though the occasional roboticist does try studying insects, as Lisa Margonelli recounts on page 22.) When drones "swarm," on the other hand, they've been choreographed in advance, or else are being controlled by human minders with joysticks. Even the DOD's recent military demos have required teleoperators.