in flight

Greater Japanese horseshoe bats gradually converge on a shared echolocation frequency after unfamiliar individuals join a colony. Instead of separating their signals into individual channels, lower-frequency bats shift upward until colony members preserve a common clutter-free band in which echoes from fluttering prey remain detectable.

A new preprint examines how pairs of homing pigeons establish leader and follower roles when navigating with unfamiliar partners. The work matters because it reveals how distributed groups can rapidly settle coordination roles without a central authority or an established social history.

A Japanese boy noticed his butterflies seemed to recognise him. He spent two years design an experiment and proved that metamorphosis does not erase memories formed during the caterpillar stage.

Researchers demonstrated a lightweight navigation system inspired by honeybee learning flights that allows small drones to return home using compact visual memories rather than large-scale mapping systems.

The advanced capabilities of AI-based navigation in military drones mean they will no longer require human training. They will rely on near-instantaneous sensor data from cameras, LiDAR, and radar to identify obstacles that will inform their future navigation, such as mountains, structures, and other aircraft.

This UK defence programme targets software-defined swarms with both simulation and live-flight trials. The importance is the transition from swarm experimentation toward engineering toolchains and operational validation platforms intended for repeatable deployment and sovereign industrial capability.

https://therecursive.com/swarmer-ipo-nasdaq-drone-ai-startup/ Swarmer Awarded $2.86M Contract to Outfit SkyKnight Drones With Swarming Software https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/05/13/3293908/0/en/Swarmer-Awarded-2-86M-Contract-to-Outfit-SkyKnight-Drones-With-Swarming-Software.html Drone interception project combines distributed sensing, autonomous coordination, and swarm-style interception behaviors into a lower-cost counter-drone platform.

Gecko is interesting because it is not a humanoid-robotics hype company. It is a very applied “robots + sensors + asset data” company aimed at boring but valuable infrastructure problems: corrosion, wall thinning, cracking, maintenance scheduling, shutdown reduction, and safety.

Researchers from SUPSI and ETH Zurich developed a firefly-inspired visible-light communication system for nano-drone swarms using LEDs and convolutional neural networks for message decoding.

A recent patent landscape analysis highlights how biologically inspired swarm coordination methods are being displaced in some military and industrial drone systems by multi-agent reinforcement learning, while still influencing routing, resilience, and distributed control architectures.

Interspecies communication networks about threats can shape animal communities, as many species produce alarm calls while eavesdropping on those of others, resulting in information flow crossing ecological niches and taxonomic boundaries.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers developed a bat-inspired sensing and navigation system that allows palm-sized drones to move through smoke, fog, and visually degraded environments using ultrasound and lightweight onboard AI.