Since it wasn't their first time collaborating, they skipped the excessive pleasantries and quickly got down to business.
"Mad Hornet System?" Nick couldn't help but look confused as he saw the name in the documents.
Bill nodded and said, "Yes, that's the internal code name for this system. Your name can't be used here."
Nick smiled upon hearing this. "The name's solid. A swarm of mad hornets is definitely lethal; it's very fitting."
"Alright, let's cut the small talk and get to work. Take a look at this. Every time we run a sim, we hit a wall right here. Latency and error reports start popping up, and then the whole system crashes." Bill waved his hand and pointed at the data on the screen.
"Let me see." Nick grabbed the mouse and started scrolling, his eyes locked onto the telemetry on the monitor.
Compared to swarm control at a fixed venue, managing a swarm in a mobile, outdoor environment was significantly more complex. One of the most brutal problems was how to process the mountain of real-time data fed back by a large-scale drone swarm.
Furthermore, the old method of using fixed coordinate base points was off the table. Instead, they were relying on GPS and Digital Terrain Matching. They had considered Inertial Navigation, but it just wasn't reliable enough for a swarm of this magnitude.
"The bottleneck is right here. There's too much navigation and positioning data for the drones to process in real-time. It's creating a massive data logjam, leading to lag, errors, and eventually a total system failure," Nick said, highlighting a key section of the code.
"But we're using your framework. You managed ten thousand drones for your show; our thirty-five hundred shouldn't be choking like this," David spoke up, clearly puzzled.
Nick shook his head. "It's a different ballgame. In Miami, we were at a fixed site where the coordinates are stable and the transmission distance is negligible. The connection is tight and the processing is lightning-fast.
Out here, you're mobile, and your coordinate data is coming down from GPS satellites. Thirty-five hundred drones are trying to pull thirty-five hundred real-time data points simultaneously and then run complex calculations to determine their relative positions. It's too much overhead."
"So we simplify the data stream?" Bill asked thoughtfully.
Nick nodded, pointing at the screen. "Look at these coordinate details. It's overkill—most of this isn't even necessary for the individual units. We can strip the noise away and only keep the essential position data for sharing."
"You mean implementing peer-to-peer positioning and information sharing?" Denzel had a flash of inspiration, sounding excited as the pieces clicked together.
Nick smiled. "Exactly. We only need the precise GPS coordinates for a few key 'anchor' units within the swarm. We use those anchors to establish a relative grid for the surrounding drones, which then calculate their own positions based on those local references. This way, the total computational load drops off a cliff."
"First, we establish backbone coordinates, then calculate the rest of the drones through those anchors—12, 24, 48—spreading out like a mesh. The whole structure is like a pyramid, where only a handful of drones at the top are actually pinging the satellites.
The rest just find their place based on the leaders, forming a complete coordinate map for the swarm." Bill broke into a smile. It was a classic case of being too close to the problem to see the solution; why hadn't they looked at it from this perspective?
David Yang[1] thought for a second and raised a concern: "This is a swarm, but it's fluid. If the swarm needs to split into sub-groups for different tasks, what happens then? And if the drones receiving the GPS data get jammed or malfunction, doesn't the whole swarm lose its bearings?"
Nick, Bill, and the others all started laughing.
Nick looked at him and explained, "It's not like only a few specific drones can receive the signal. Every unit is capable. If an anchor unit drops out, the system just handshakes with the next one in line.
It's like a flock of geese. If the lead bird gets tired or falls, the flock doesn't just crash; a new leader steps up instantly and the formation holds. Every drone in the swarm is GPS-capable; we just don't need all of them drawing power and bandwidth to do it at once. We can hot-swap them on the fly."
"That is a brilliant workaround!" Denzel praised, sounding energized. "We can even have the swarm make autonomous decisions. If the terrain gets rough or the signal weakens, we increase the number of anchor units. Under normal conditions, we can rotate the task to save battery across the board."
"Exactly. The tech isn't even that difficult to implement; it's just a logic shift. We can bake it directly into the core system to replace the current protocols," Nick said with a smile.
The others nodded in agreement. Bill looked at him and said, "Nicholas, since you've got the best handle on this, I'm putting you in charge of the rewrite. I'll have the flight engineering team cooperate fully. Let's get this bug squashed so we can get to the flight test."
"No problem. We're here to work," Nick said confidently.
They might as well make the most of it. The sooner they finished the job, the sooner they could get out of this remote valley. In this high-desert landscape, there was nothing to do but grind.
With the help of pros like David, Nick's team made rapid progress. It was mostly a matter of optimizing the existing codebase—tedious, but well within their wheelhouse. However, the testing phase would be the real hurdle, requiring endless iterations to ensure the software played nice with the hardware.
The thirty-five hundred drones for this project were all fixed-wing aircraft, meaning their speed, turn radius, and altitude indicators were worlds away from the quadcopters Nick was used to. This required constant recalibration. Every time they tweaked one variable, it rippled through the entire system.
But the clock was ticking. They had to be ready for the live-fire test by September 25th. They were racing against the calendar to get the code optimized and the hardware prepped for the most important flight of their lives.
[1] In case you forgot him, he's Bill's assistant