Our friend at the British Defense blog ThinkDefence has a short post regarding some experiments being undertaken by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. They have reportedly succeeded in having 50 small unmanned aircraft operating cooperatively all under the control of one man.

The thing that caught my eye was this statement, “There are also algorithms for search-and-rescue operations, in which the flight pattern resembles that of foraging bees.”

The linked post is about doing SAR post natural disaster on land, but perhaps there are some possibility for the Coast Guard here.