An Open-Source UAV Platform for Swarm Robotics Research: Using Cooperative Sensor Fusion for Inter-Robot Tracking

作者：Sinan Oğuz, M. K. Heinrich, Michael Allwright, Weixu Zhu, Mostafa Wahby, Emanuele Garone, Marco Dorigo · 发表于：IEEE Access · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1109/access.2024.3378607 · 被引用次数：15 · 研究领域：Computer Science

In this work, we present an open-source unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform for research in swarm robotics. In swarm robotics, groups of robots collaborate using local interactions and collectively solve tasks beyond an individual robot’s capabilities. Individual robots must have onboard processing, communication, and sensing capabilities to autonomously react to their neighbors and immediate environment. Most research involving UAVs in swarm robotics presents only simulation results, while key landmark studies with real UAV swarms have used UAV platforms that were custom-built for the respective study. One important reason for this is that no commercial UAV platform comes pre-equipped with the ability to identify and track the positions and poses of nearby drones using only onboard sensors and computation, and in research platforms, the relevant sensing technologies are currently under development. Our aim is to provide a platform that allows swarm robotics researchers to test their algorithms on real UAVs, without having to develop their own custom-built UAVs or to wait until more advanced sensing technology is ready off-the-shelf. We provide a well-documented, entirely open-source UAV platform— S-drone (Swarm-drone)—to foster and support UAV swarm research in a laboratory environment. The S-drone uses fiducial markers in the environment and cooperative feature-level sensor fusion for inter-robot tracking to track the presence, identity, relative 2D position, and relativ...