A “Distributed Flight Array” of miniature vehicles that can self-assemble and then take off vertically and fly as a stable array has been developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Each vehicle has its own motor and flight control system and is equipped with a computer, sensors, and wireless communication systems. When the vehicles are joined together, the combination becomes a sophisticated flight platform capable of coordinated flight, with data shared rapidly between the individual vehicles and flight control distributed across the array.

Future applications could include lifting heavy objects, with the number of vehicles or modules in the array selected according to the lift required. The modular nature of the array also means some failure can be tolerated since if one or two vehicles fail, the others can compensate.