A Swarm of Drones Programmed to Chase You Down and Collide with Your Face

The robot uprising is obviously inevitable, but until a decade or so ago we only had to worry about them chasing us down over land. Now, with the widespread proliferation of flying drones, we have to worry about them attacking us from the skies. Nobody understands that better than Michael Reeves, so he figured he might as well jump start the uprising and build his own human head-seeking drone swarm.

For this build he used a swarm of 12 Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Editions, which is where he ran into his first hurdle. The drones connect to your computer or phone directly through a WiFi access point that they host, which means that you can only control one drone at a time with a single computer. The solution was to convince the drones to connect to a WiFi router, which acts as an intermediary between Reeves’ computer and the swarm.

With the ability to control all of the drones simultaneously, Reeves setup facial recognition software on his computer. It would have been too resource-intensive to run the facial recognition for every drone, so instead he promoted four of them to “leader” drones that each have two followers. When those leader drones spot a human face, they and their followers plot a course and fly into it. The first couple of tests were a disaster, and the drones just collided with each other and the room. But, with some fine tuning, Reeves was able to get his killer drone swarm working fairly well.