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Hive Mentality: Drone swarms are on the horizon


The FAA recently approved the use of multiple unmanned aircraft on a single farm, promising to make it easier to manage large fields. But regulators say the technology is weighed down by a lot of unknowns.

Drones, and sometimes referred to as unmanned aerial systems (UAS), are the most recent addition, surging in popularity among farmers with large fields who primarily use them to survey for crop disease and damage, drop seeds, and spray chemicals and fertilizers. Erickson explained that the U.S. government is pushing to ban foreign-made drones because of potential vulnerabilities to data mining and spy devices that could gather intel about crop locations or even U.S. military positions. Still, Erickson estimates the technology needs another five to 10 years of fine-tuning until drones and their swarms achieve full autonomy — when a fleet could potentially rely on AI to communicate with one another and accomplish different tasks.

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