Prof. Serge Chaumette
Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique, France

Title: IA at the Edge: a Key Enabler to Support Large Swarms of Small Autonomous Drones and Similar Systems

Abstract: Swarms of small drones have recently gained attention due to a large extent to their use in the war in Ukraine. Beyond the straightforward saturation effect that can be achieved by juxtaposing a significant number of drones, more complex missions require the drones to share the load of a common global goal. To achieve the required collaboration/cooperation in a more or less coupled manner to fulfil such a goal, many different approaches exist. Among these, the approach that consists in making each drone autonomous (which may seem counterintuitive) offers a number of advantages in terms of scalability, security, furtiveness, etc. This requires distributing the intelligence of the global system across each individual drone, i.e. at the edge of the system seen as a whole. The goal of this talk is to address this strategy of placing IA at the edge, to cover some of the underlying technics and technologies at play (distribution by design, distributed algorithmic, distributed learning, federated learning, etc.), and to discuss what future generations of swarms might look like.

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