The ADARS (Automating the Design of Autonomous Robot Swarms) project aims to propose a unique approach to automatically generate behaviours for distributed aerospace and space systems (DASS) thanks to a cross-fertilisation between multi-objective optimisation and machine learning techniques. ADARS will demonstrate through specifically designed software simulations and real field tests with multi-rotor drones, that state-of-the-art results can be obtained on two challenging DASS applications: swarm formation for a counter UAV system and swarm formation of small satellites for asteroid observation.