AirSwarm: Enabling Cost-Effective Multi-UAV Research with COTS drones

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Xiaowei, Xu, Kuan, Liu, Fen, Bai, Ruofei, Yuan, Shenghai, Xie, Lihua
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Xiaowei
Xu, Kuan
Liu, Fen
Bai, Ruofei
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
author_facet Li, Xiaowei
Xu, Kuan
Liu, Fen
Bai, Ruofei
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
contents Traditional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm missions rely heavily on expensive custom-made drones with onboard perception or external positioning systems, limiting their widespread adoption in research and education. To address this issue, we propose AirSwarm. AirSwarm democratizes multi-drone coordination using low-cost commercially available drones such as Tello or Anafi, enabling affordable swarm aerial robotics research and education. Key innovations include a hierarchical control architecture for reliable multi-UAV coordination, an infrastructure-free visual SLAM system for precise localization without external motion capture, and a ROS-based software framework for simplified swarm development. Experiments demonstrate cm-level tracking accuracy, low-latency control, communication failure resistance, formation flight, and trajectory tracking. By reducing financial and technical barriers, AirSwarm makes multi-robot education and research more accessible. The complete instructions and open source code will be available at
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AirSwarm: Enabling Cost-Effective Multi-UAV Research with COTS drones
Li, Xiaowei
Xu, Kuan
Liu, Fen
Bai, Ruofei
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
Robotics
Traditional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm missions rely heavily on expensive custom-made drones with onboard perception or external positioning systems, limiting their widespread adoption in research and education. To address this issue, we propose AirSwarm. AirSwarm democratizes multi-drone coordination using low-cost commercially available drones such as Tello or Anafi, enabling affordable swarm aerial robotics research and education. Key innovations include a hierarchical control architecture for reliable multi-UAV coordination, an infrastructure-free visual SLAM system for precise localization without external motion capture, and a ROS-based software framework for simplified swarm development. Experiments demonstrate cm-level tracking accuracy, low-latency control, communication failure resistance, formation flight, and trajectory tracking. By reducing financial and technical barriers, AirSwarm makes multi-robot education and research more accessible. The complete instructions and open source code will be available at
title AirSwarm: Enabling Cost-Effective Multi-UAV Research with COTS drones
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06890