The elaborate operation could build upon findings from Southampton research to evaluate larger and more efficient fleets of AI-driven robot swarms.

“It would be an incredibly complex coordination task to have all these different types of drones,” Gopal says. “Santa will need to be able to check they are putting the right gifts in the right stockings and be able to intervene if the drones find it difficult to distinguish which is required.

“Then you have the issue of safety; we don't want the drones to crash into chimneys or hurt any animals. He'll need to ensure they have a collision avoidance system in place.”

The mind-boggling scale of the operation requires immense organisation, however Santa Claus is used to the huge task of distributing billions of presents every year.

“There would be too many controllers for Santa and the elves to oversee, so they will probably need to use something like Siri or Alexa to direct and control them,” Gopal says. “Hopefully the work we are doing in the TAS hub has helped to build a trustworthy drone system that can save Christmas.”

Gopal recommends that a customary mince pie, carrot or sweet treat could still be left out for the drones to collect this December, but a complementary charging station might prove even more useful for the seasonal swarm.

Processing such vast amounts of data would require an immensely powerful supercomputer and, if rumours are true, Santa might also soon rely on this facility to work out which gifts to assign to all the world’s children.

“Determining the naughty vs nice list has been shown to be computationally intractable,” says Joseph Early, Southampton doctoral student with The Alan Turing Institute.

“Based on the recent publication from Claus et al, we believe the GIFT metric is being used as a proxy to estimate which children should receive presents this year. However, concerns over the privacy implications of this new method have been raised, casting doubt on whether any gifts will be delivered at all.”

We’ll just have to wait until Christmas morning to see if Santa’s succeeded…