Swarm

Swarm is an open competition for the AI that flies drones on its own. Drones already deliver packages, inspect bridges and power lines and search for survivors after disasters, but the flight software is usually built behind closed doors, where nobody can compare one model against another.

Swarm turns that into a public contest: anyone can train a drone pilot, submit it, and watch it score on a live leaderboard across thousands of simulated worlds it has never seen before. What the subnet produces is that benchmark and its ranked pool of flight models, plus the open-source tooling to train and test them locally. The pilots are not meant to stay in simulation — the team also published Langostino, an open-source 3D-printed drone with a full build guide, to fly them on real hardware.

Miners train a drone pilot and submit it as a model graph - trained ONNX networks wired together by a manifest. In flight, the model sees the world through a single depth camera and knows its own position and speed; fifty times a second it answers with a direction, a speed and a turn, with no map, no GPS and no list of obstacles. Swarm runs five separate mission families - Search and Rescue, Swarm Search and Rescue, Swarm Autopilot, Interceptor and Autopilot - and each hotkey competes in exactly one of them with one model and one final submission.

Validators fly every model through 1,100 freshly generated worlds each week (cities, forests, mountains, warehouses, ski villages, open terrain), scoring each 60-second flight from 0 to 1 on mission success, speed and safety, and ranking it by the average across all worlds. Emissions follow a King of the Hill mechanism: each family keeps its own line of champions, and the last five champions share that family's slice of emissions, with each older seat holding 70% of the weight of the seat above it and a bonus for how much it raised the record when crowned. A dethroned king keeps earning until five newer crownings push it out of the window, and if a family goes seven days without a new crowning its whole slice burns until someone beats the record again.