Delegating Tasks and Predicting Behavior: What Bitmedia Labs’ Drone Swarm Will Look Like

Bitmedia Labs is an international product IT company founded in 2014. Today it unites more than 140 specialists worldwide and has offices in Kyiv, Berlin, Warsaw, and London. The company’s core focus includes an online platform for promoting Web3 projects, blockchain-based game development, and its own NFT initiatives.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Bitmedia Labs has been actively supporting both the military and civilians. Almost immediately, the team created its own charitable foundation, Bit Spilka, which has already supported dozens of Armed Forces units and implemented initiatives in tactical medicine and humanitarian aid. In 2024, the company expanded its focus and began investing in UAV development, including autonomous drone swarm systems capable of performing complex missions on their own.

Blockchain and charity: how an IT company came to invest in drones

Bitmedia Labs has worked with blockchain technology since its early days. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it became clear that blockchain is not only a decentralization tool, but also a financial solution that can quickly impact complex situations here and now. Transparency, fast transactions, lower fees, and accessibility for donors from different countries helped charities scale support for the military and civilians from the very first days of the war.

At the end of 2024, Bitmedia Labs started investing in UAV development, including autonomous drone swarm technologies that can act in coordination without direct human control. This approach emerged as a response to the changing nature of warfare: heavy equipment that was effective in previous centuries is increasingly replaced by mobile, precise, and flexible solutions.

This direction became a natural extension of the company’s Web3 and decentralized technology experience: ideas of autonomy, distributed coordination, and efficient resource management are now being transferred from the digital world to real-world operations.

How the drone swarm will work: explaining the complex in simple words

The core technology used to coordinate drones is reinforcement learning (RL).

In an advanced physical simulation, an agent — a single drone or the entire swarm — observes the state of the environment and predicts the optimal behavior strategy. For example, it can analyze the drones’ speed or positions and adjust the distances between them. As a reward, the agent receives a signal indicating how useful the action was for achieving the goal. The goal of RL is to maximize the cumulative reward over time.

Bitmedia Labs considers the swarm a decentralized or partially decentralized system. Each drone should make decisions based on local observations, including visual data from itself and neighboring drones, while the objective is to achieve consistent global behavior. Coordination and conflict avoidance between agents remain key challenges for developers.

As a result, Bitmedia Labs aims to build a swarm that:

• can self-organize and maintain a defined formation during flight while remaining minimally dependent on external localization systems like GPS
• actively explores the environment using cameras, detects and localizes specified objects or targets
• executes tasks in a coordinated manner and learns to delegate, for example sending one drone for closer inspection while the rest dynamically adjust formation

A drone swarm can significantly change the battlefield: improve reconnaissance and help seize initiative during active combat operations.

For Bitmedia Labs, this project is more than an engineering challenge. It’s about responsibility alongside expertise. The team believes technology should drive change and is building a community that shares this vision.