A Cost-Efficient Platform Design for Distributed UAV Swarm Research

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been attracting more and more attention in research and education. Specifically, Swarm intelligence is a promising future technology of UAVs and the frontier of multi-agent system research. It has the characteristics of low individual cost, strong system flexibility and robustness, and has great potential in many tasks. However, due to the constraints of research conditions and cost, most of the current researches on large-scale swarm UAVs are carried out in the simulation environment. Building a low-cost open-source software and hardware platform for swarm UAVs is an important basis for promoting researches on swarm UAVs and multi-agent systems. In this paper, we propose a design of a UAV platform with common cost-efficient hardware and a rich open-source software ecosystem, and provide a software solution for swarm robots based on the open-source robot operating system ROS. These software packages support the rapid programming development of swarm behaviors and different communication topology. Experiments have been conducted for typical UAV tasks like flocking and formation, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed platform.