Six drones flew indoors for about two cumulative hours without a collision while using SwarmNxt, a shared planning and monitoring platform. Researchers at EPFL and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology reported the experiment in an unreviewed preprint on September 10.
A drone in a group has to avoid not only the current positions of its neighbours but also the paths they are about to take. In SwarmNxt, each aircraft plans its own route and shares that route with the others. An external camera system supplies the drones' positions in the test arena.
The six-drone test took place in an empty arena. The aircraft first exchanged positions and then repeatedly flew toward changing destinations. The absence of collisions across the recorded flight time shows that the shared trajectory protocol worked under those controlled conditions.
A second experiment added obstacles and used four drones. Cameras on each aircraft fed an AI model that estimated distance, allowing onboard software to build a local map and plan around the objects. The team recorded another 30 cumulative minutes without collisions.
The platform also checks cameras and clocks before flight, displays battery levels and communication delays during operation and collects logs afterward. Those tools matter because coordination failures may begin in timing, networking or preparation rather than in the path planner itself.
Outdoor flight remains untested. The main six-drone result depends on external tracking, and the onboard depth estimates in the obstacle test can miss small or distant objects. Tests without arena infrastructure must measure near misses and lost communication as well as collisions before the system can support field operations.
Sources
- SwarmNxt research preprint, arXiv:2609.11382v1, submitted September 10, 2026.
- SwarmNxt documentation: flight preparation, monitoring and logs.
- Illustrative file photograph: Walkera QR X350 Quadcopter Hovering by Doodybutch (2013), reproduced unchanged under CC BY-SA 3.0. The photograph shows a consumer quadcopter, not the SwarmNxt research aircraft.
