Authors - Serge Chaumette Abstract - Swarms of drones have been used for a few years in the military and civil domains, and their size has increased significantly. However, this has made them really challenging to manage. Among the issues, shape formation is one of the difficult operations to address. This increase in size is particularly significant for shows where large numbers (several hundreds to thousands) of drones are operated every day. These drones must obey precise flight plans to achieve the expected visual effects. Still, for these applications, there is no real need for dynamic shapes organization, since they can be computed offline prior to the mission. Shape formation is thus manageable. Even though military use cases are less visible to the general public, swarms of moderate yet significant sizes are used on theaters of operation, for instance, to achieve a saturation effect. There is little time in operation to prepare a mission, and the shape of the swarm is subject to changes that cannot be anticipated and that depend on the scenario and on its dynamic evolution, which is by nature unknown in advance. A process is thus required that can be initiated without major ground intervention (to ensure stealthiness and resilience), and that can be achieved in a collaborative manner within the swarms. In this paper, we address this issue of seamlessly organizing a swarm of drones in a given shape. We propose an innovative approach based on a DNA inspired code that circulates among the drones. This initial work raises a number of issues that relate to the nature of the target shape. These issues will be addressed in our future work.
