Ng S. Thinking Swarms 2025

Textbook in PDF format

Swarming technologies are an emerging technology that have civilian and defence applications. These technologies consist of robotic and autonomous systems that can interact/act in concert with one another to achieve specific effects. As outlined at the start of this book, for something to count as a swarm, there needs to be many, not just a few, interacting systems. We currently lack a complete understanding or consensus about what a swarm is, which is at least partially a reflection of the reality that swarm development remains in its early stages. Despite this, swarming technology is of interest for a range of sectors, including agriculture, mining, space exploration and defence. In other areas of robotics, autonomous systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI), lack of agreement on key terms has hampered interdisciplinary discussion, for instance, in relation to the ethical and technical challenges of autonomous weapon systems.
The use of autonomous weapon systems (“AWS”) in military swarms, a tactic promising greater military advantage, involves converging massed physical effects and concentrating combat power through autonomous technology. This tactic allows for less complex computing in the autonomous individual agents and allows the swarm to conduct more complex tasks than an individual agent. However, it provides redundancy in cases of destruction of individual agents within the “smart, small and many” autonomous systems that comprise the swarm as a whole. Unlike investing in ‘few and exquisite’ high-end military capabilities, there are obvious tactical and acquisition advantages in adopting such technologies. Reduced to its most basic description, a swarm is a group of individual systems or agents that operate as a collective. Although this volume engages with the difficulties of properly defining and articulating exactly what swarming is, in this chapter, to the extent possible, the issues raised about the review of AWS swarms will be definition-agnostic, noting that this issue would require resolution in the capability description prompting the weapons review itself.
Drone swarms differ to drones employed en masse, in which large numbers of individual drones are individually tasked to complete a mission. Swarming as a military tactic is designed to overwhelm or saturate the target’s ability to adequately defend. When describing the act of swarming as a tactic, the Australia Defence Force defines it as “the large mass of autonomous systems interoperating collectively to act and respond in a coordinated effort to provide an overwhelming effect”. Emulating the swarming behaviour of different animal species, military swarming permits low-cost systems to operate as a collective, without a central controller, using common algorithmic rules to achieve military goals.
This book is a multidisciplinary examination of swarm systems including swarm robotics. The book starts with a multidisciplinary consultation performed by the editors with participants from academia, industry and government. The consultation suggested four themes forming parts one to four and grouping the first 16 chapters. Part 1 contains definitions, categorisations and metaphors of swarm systems. Part 2 zooms-in with a behavioural lens on interpretations, narrative theory, and legal frameworks. Part 3 sheds a topological light on cognitive architectures and formations. Part 4 illumes cognitive dimensions on swarm lifelong and curriculum learning and hyper-teaming of swarm systems. The book concludes with future research directions in Part 5. The book is suitable for graduate students and researchers looking for inspiration and novel ideas to explore, or those attempting to understand the diversity of challenges in advanced swarm systems