Crazyswarm

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Description

The Crazyswarm is a swarm of miniature quadcopters (Crazyflie 2.0) that can fly together in close proximity. Our approach has the goal to make research in multi-robot systems safer, cheaper, and easier to reproduce. The Crazyswarm has the following features (amongst others):

  • Safe operation near humans
  • Small footprint allows to fly many vehicles in small lab spaces
  • Good crash resistance because of low inertia
  • Fully open-source
  • Off-the-shelf hardware
The system currently requires a motion capture system (e.g. VICON, OptiTrack, or PhaseSpace).

More information, including tutorials on how to setup the Crazyswarm, can be found on its webpage. A video demonstrating the swarms' capabilities is shown below.

We used the Crazyswarm to experimentally validate our trajectory planning approach for large quadrotor teams (see related publications below). In the future, we are looking at other applications, including distributed algorithms.

Investigators

In collaboration with the Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory (RESL).

  • Wolfgang Hönig (Summer 2016 - )
  • James Preiss (RESL) (Summer 2016 - )
  • Gaurav Sukhatme (RESL) (Summer 2016 - )
  • Nora Ayanian (Summer 2016 - )
  • Daniel Lytle (Fall 2016 - )
  • Trevor Nielsen (Fall 2016 - )
  • Eric Yi Han Chen (Fall 2016 - )
  • Alex Colello (Fall 2017 - )
  • Barbara Boyajian (Fall 2017 - )
  • Jillian Khoo (Fall 2017 - )
  • Minzhi Xue (Fall 2015 - Spring 2016)
  • Chotiwat Chawannakul (Summer 2016 - Summer 2017)

Related Publications

  • M. Debord, W. Hönig, and N. Ayanian. "Trajectory Planning for Heterogeneous Robot Teams", in Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 2018.
    [ PDF Preprint, Video, Blog Post ]
  • M. Debord, W. Hönig, and N. Ayanian. "Trajectory Planning for Heterogeneous Robot Teams", in 2nd International Symposium on Aerial Robotics (ISAR), Philadelphia, USA, June 2018.
    [ PDF Preprint, Video ]
  • W. Hönig, J. A. Preiss, T. K. S. Kumar, G. S. Sukhatme, and N. Ayanian. "Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms", in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), Special Issue Aerial Swarm Robotics. To Appear.
    [ PDF Preprint, Video ]
  • J. A. Preiss, W. Hönig, G. S. Sukhatme, and N. Ayanian. "Downwash-Aware Trajectory Planning for Large Quadrotor Teams", in Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Vancouver, BC, Canada, September 2017.
    [ PDF Preprint, Video ]
  • J. A. Preiss, W. Hönig, G. S. Sukhatme, and N. Ayanian. "Downwash-Aware Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms", in International Symposium on Aerial Robotics, Philadelphia, PA, USA, June 2017.
    [ PDF Preprint ]
  • J. A. Preiss, W. Hönig, G. S. Sukhatme, and N. Ayanian. "Downwash-Aware Trajectory Planning for Large Quadcopter Teams", in Southern California Robotics Symposium (SCR), Los Angeles, CA, April 2017.
    [ PDF Preprint ]
  • J. A. Preiss*, W. Hönig*, G. S. Sukhatme, and N. Ayanian. "Crazyswarm: A Large Nano-Quadcopter Swarm", in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Singapore, 2017.
    [ PDF Preprint, Video ]
  • J. A. Preiss*, W. Hönig*, G. S. Sukhatme, and N. Ayanian. "Crazyswarm: A Large Nano-Quadcopter Swarm (Extended Abstract)", in Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (Late Breaking), Daejeon, Korea, October 2016.
    [ PDF Preprint, Video ]

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