What if we Could Entangle Drones? Towards the Management of a Swarm of Drones as a Non-Local Quantum Object

Abstract: Since a few years, swarms of drones are used in both the civil and military domains. They might be composed of tens, hundreds if not thousands of drones (e.g. to achieve saturation effect). It thus becomes hard to deal with each of the individual drones that make it. Therefore, making a swarm a single object, that could then be controlled as a single entity, whatever its size and its surface, is the grail.Many projects have been working on this issue. Still, as far as we know, none has been convincingly successful. There are a number of reasons for that.From a conceptual point of view, the controls that make sense at the level of a swarm are not simply an upscale of the operations that make sense for the drones that compose it. Some controls are easy to upscale (take off, land) and to map back from the swarm to its individual components. Some are more difficult. For instance, what does it mean and does it even make sense to move a swarm to a given location? There is an underlying notion of synchronization that remains hidden if stating things so simply: when should the move begin, should the members go together, when is the move terminated, etc.? Whatever the answers to these questions, this requires stable communication and strong synchronization between the members of the swarm, which cannot be guaranteed in most theaters of operations, especially for large swarms. Additionally, there are operations that only make sense at the level of a swarm, not of an individual drone. For instance, it might be useful to split a swarm into two smaller sub swarms, and later reconnect them as a single object.From a technical point of view, two major configurations are to be considered. First, it the swarm is controlled by some central system on the ground (C2, Command and Control) it makes things partly tractable. The C2 has a global view of all the members of the swarm and the above issues can be dealt with, knowing the required information about each unitary system. Still this does not solve the problems of congestion, latences and disruptions. Second, if the swarm is composed of autonomous systems, i.e. when the swarm is composed of drones that decide on their own on their behavior, it becomes much more difficult. Still, this is the most interesting configuration in real world operation because autonomy makes it possible to address BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) missions and avoids swarm to ground communication.The question to solve is what do we precisely expect when willing to make a swarm a single object? We claim that the perfect result would be to break the locality of each individual drone making the swarm a non-local object as if the drones were some sort of entangled (by analogy with quantum physics and the EPR principle). Therefore, our provocative claim that future swarms generation will be quantum swarms.

Keywords: Drones, swarms, quantum, entanglement, control

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005569

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