I would assume "in formation" would be more advanced than "kinda jumbled near each other" given the degree of coordination required. The sample video of real-life drones shows them crossing each other's paths (drone on R goes past both on the L) which doesn't seem terribly useful. The fact that the simulation had the drones move in an hourglass shape seems to show the same problem, they're not maintaining any kind of order for the flight, only spread out at the start and end.

I don't see how this is more advanced than each drone getting a start and end point and attempting to maintain a line. Is staying close to each other that significant of a challenge that I'm missing something?

Edit: The article is trash, the actual project is just navigating multiple drones in a highly-obstructed environment, nothing about maintaining formation. That's the impressive part, and this seems pretty damn good.

there were only like 4 drones.. what kind of formation were you expecting? A quadrilateral, yes they created a quadrilateral shape lol

There were more than four drones in the simulation.

a simulation for such tangible milestones is hardly worthy of a research paper. Deploy 'em drones and see if the algorithm works out!