Rapid advancement of emerging autonomous robotic technologies makes swarm robotics popular in research which focuses on solving the real problems by new tools and methods. Particularly, the swarm robots with a number of quadrotors have been available for an increasing range of applications, from civil engineering and industrial detection to new forms of interactive art. To date, more and more people are getting into the drone world in their daily life. However, there is still great space to introduce the swarm drones into more applications.

This project will build a new application area for the swarm drones. It intends to introduce the drones installed with LED for the new media, to conduct a comprehensive macro and micro market analysis, and also to present a commercial plane f...[ Read more ]

Rapid advancement of emerging autonomous robotic technologies makes swarm robotics popular in research which focuses on solving the real problems by new tools and methods. Particularly, the swarm robots with a number of quadrotors have been available for an increasing range of applications, from civil engineering and industrial detection to new forms of interactive art. To date, more and more people are getting into the drone world in their daily life. However, there is still great space to introduce the swarm drones into more applications.

This project will build a new application area for the swarm drones. It intends to introduce the drones installed with LED for the new media, to conduct a comprehensive macro and micro market analysis, and also to present a commercial plane for drone formation shows and interaction in entertainment & media markets. The application aims at customers of public exhibitions, theme parks and science museums.

In technique, the swarm drones can fly in a free trajectory in the space. The drone state estimator can be used to calculate the drone state through a data fusion algorithm based on the IMU, optical flow and outside localization sensors. Therein, the output localization sensors can be GPS in an outdoor environment or motion capture/UWB in an indoor environment; then, a path following algorithm calculates the orientation command and sends it to flight controller. A real-time telecommunication is also built among two drones and the ground station, where each drone can report its own position and status to other neighboring drones and the ground station. With a collision avoidance algorithm to generate repulsive force between the drones, the flying path can be effectively generated. Besides, the ground station can cease the drone flight in any emergency and makes the drones land safely.