Agricultural drone swarms lose cloud connection mid-flight and crash without edge AI

Coordinated agricultural drone swarms spraying pesticide across large fields must make real-time collision avoidance and path-replanning decisions every 100ms, but at 50-100 meters altitude over open farmland, cellular connectivity drops unpredictably -- a 3-second cloud API timeout during a formation maneuver means two $5,000 drones collide and crash into the crop they were protecting. A swarm of 12 drones can cover in 20 minutes what takes a single drone 4 hours, but only if they can coordinate without connectivity gaps. Cloud-dependent swarm coordination fails because the connectivity is not just slow but intermittent -- the drone has signal, then does not, then does again -- and any gap during a coordinated turn is catastrophic. Each drone running an on-device Gemma model for local path planning and neighbor-awareness makes independent collision-avoidance decisions using onboard LIDAR and inter-drone mesh radio, so cloud dropout does not cause loss of coordination or aircraft.