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

作者：Xiaowei Li, Ke Xu, Fen Liu, Ruofei Bai, Shenghai Yuan, Lihua Xie · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1109/iros60139.2025.11246032 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization、Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems、UAV Applications and Optimization

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 https://github.com/vvEverett/tello_ros.