College - Author 1
College of Engineering
Department - Author 1
Electrical Engineering Department
Degree Name - Author 1
BS in Electrical Engineering
College - Author 2
College of Engineering
Department - Author 2
Electrical Engineering Department
Degree - Author 2
BS in Electrical Engineering
Date
6-2025
Primary Advisor
Siavash Farzan, College of Engineering, Electrical Engineering Department
Abstract/Summary
Micro-UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) due to their inexpensive nature and compact form factor have shown an increase in prevalence throughout a multitude of applications including, but not limited to: search and rescue, military reconnaissance, and agriculture monitoring. However, for a majority of these high impact applications, a swarm of micro-UAVs are required and furthermore mandate that they are able to cooperatively and autonomously coordinate with each other. For long, controlling and communicating between a user and a singular micro-UAV has been a well known and solved problem, however the same can't be said for swarms of micro-UAVs. This project seeks to address this problem by developing a framework for Crazyflies, a type of micro-UAV, to cooperatively communicate and coordinate movements with each other. This is ultimately achieved by utilizing a REST API to serve commands from the user and collect localization data in a pseudo-P2P (peer to peer) fashion between the drones in the swarm. Additionally, the swarm of Crazyflies coordinate movements based off localization data served by the pseudo-P2P network via a leader-follower hierarchal topology. To conclusively validate this approach experiments with three Crazyflies flying in a predefined triangle and line formations are conducted to confirm the reliability and accuracy of the pseudo-P2P network and coordination based off the leader-follower topology. While the drones were generally able to maintain their intended relative positions, quantitative analysis using the RMSE metric revealed measurable deviations, particularly in the line formation, where the average RMSE reached approximately 0.466 meters. Nonetheless, the system exhibits robust real-time performance and reliable formation maintenance, demonstrating its potential for a wide range of multi-agent robotics applications. Overall, this implementation of a framework that enables reliable and fast micro-UAV swarm coordination, opens the door for a multitude of applications such as search and rescue and agriculture monitoring.
URL: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/eesp/689