Teams of small drones. They are cheap, fast and fragile, they carry little compute, and they can’t stop and think in mid-air.
Platforms
Most indoor swarm research flies the Crazyflie, a 27 g open-source quadrotor, and Crazyswarm, which flies 49 of them in dense formation from one base station. Every pose in Crazyswarm comes from one motion-capture system, so a tracker fault hits every drone at once and the room itself is a single point of failure. Outdoors, drones use GNSS, which can be spoofed.
Papers
- Pursuit and evasion. Kouzehgar and others train scouts and pursuers with a role-based multi-agent RL method and fly six Crazyflies with UWB positioning. The follow-up adds a changing communication network. Both trust every teammate’s report.
- Safe flight. Learned barrier certificates and equivariant graph CBFs keep swarms from colliding. See safe control.
- Spoofing. Vijay and others check GNSS positions against measured ranges between drones, with four real Crazyflies and three simulated ones. RigidShift shows the limit: shift the whole swarm slowly and every pairwise range stays correct, so no relative check can see it. Gil and others use the physics of the radio channel to catch spoofed identities, which works well indoors and is hard in free space.
- Perception. Mono-Hydra builds a scene graph from a camera and an IMU, which a small drone can carry. USS-Nav runs at 15 Hz on a Jetson Orin NX. HEROIC coordinates drones and ground robots for search, with all messages in natural language.
Questions
- How much of a ground robot’s perception stack fits on a drone that weighs 27 g?
- Which of the coordination results survive when positions come from GNSS that someone may be spoofing?
Related: multi-robot systems, resilient consensus, robot security, Singapore scenarios.