Drones work best operating in packs. Last year, a study by the RAND corporation showed that when two or more drones are tracking the same target, they are much more successful at staying on its trail. Right now, however, flying drones is very labor intensive, with each drone requiring a team of pilots and observers. DARPA wants to solve both of these problems by putting more drones in the sky -- with fewer humans controlling them.

The defense research house is calling a meeting together under the name "Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment," or CODE. The full name means "working together in places where people are actively trying to make it hard to fly," and the acronym shows the way that DARPA hopes to solve this problem: with superior programming. Successfully flying modern military aircraft in actively dangerous skies, with all the communications and data involved, is a problem the Air Force is trying to solve. Here, DARPA wants to specifically address it for drones.

The meetings are scheduled for March 2015 in Arlington, Virginia, and DARPA is inviting "participants with capabilities, methodologies, and approaches that are related to CODE research and focused on revolutionary approaches to unmanned aircraft systems, autonomy and collaborative operations."