{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/airswarm-enabling-cost-effective-multi-uav","title":"AirSwarm: Enabling Cost-Effective Multi-UAV Research with COTS drones","arxiv_id":"2503.06890","date":"2025-03-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xiaowei Li","Kuan Xu","Fen Liu","Ruofei Bai","Shenghai Yuan","Lihua Xie"],"abstract":"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","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06890v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06890v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"airswarm-enabling-cost-effective-multi-uav","repo_url":"https://github.com/vvEverett/tello_ros","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2503.06890","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.06890","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}