In the immediate aftermath of disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires, and floods, the firstfew hours are critical for saving lives, yet they are often the most hazardous for humanresponders. Swarm robotics and autonomous drone systems present a promising paradigm foraddressing this challenge by enabling coordinated fleets of unmanned agents to perform taskssuch as mapping, search and rescue, supply delivery, and communication relay withoutexposing human responders to immediate risk. This paper provides a comprehensive review of swarm robotics and autonomous dronetechnologies in the context of disaster response. It examines key coordination algorithms,communication frameworks, and control architectures that enable collective behavior inunstructured and dynamic environments. Applications including urban search and rescue,wildfire monitoring, flood mapping, and infrastructure inspection are analyzed to assesspractical capabilities. The paper also highlights critical challenges that hinder real-world deployment, includingmaintaining coordination under intermittent communication, operating in unpredictableenvironments, and integrating autonomous systems into existing human-led disastermanagement frameworks. Finally, emerging directions such as AI-driven adaptive taskallocation, resilient mesh networking, and advanced human-swarm interaction models arediscussed as potential enablers for next-generation systems.
Aadhar Gupta (Tue,) studied this question.