Aerial Swarm Tools and Applications

Half-Day Tutorial and Workshop at RSS 2024

Objective

This workshop provides tutorials as well as a platform for exchange to manage teams of aerial robots. The first part contains tutorials for the major aerial swarm tools, namely CrazyChoir, Aerostack2, and Crazyswarm2, which are all based on ROS 2. These are meant to help researchers who are looking for aerial swarm validation in simulation and/or with physical robots to understand the capabilities and the first steps with these tools. At the same time, more experienced users or swarm tool developers will gain insights about tools. The second part is focused on real-world applications for aerial swarms, with invited talks from academia and industry, poster session for contributed papers, as well as a forum to discuss ongoing challenges that arise with particular focus on the current tools for aerial swarms.

Important Dates

Workshop day: July 19th, 2024 (14:00 - 18:00)

Schedule

This schedule is preliminary and may be subject to change.

13:50 - Introduction workshop
14:00 - Sabine Hauert
14:30 - Gábor Vásárhelyi
15:00 - Aerostack2 tutorial
15:30 - Coffee break
16:00 - Crazyswarm2 Tutorial
16:30 - Crazychoir Tutorial
17:00 - Angela Schoelig
17:30 - Martin Saska

Invited Speakers

Angela Schoellig

Technical University Munich

Martin Saska

Czech Technical University in Prague

Talk: "Onboard relative localization for agile aerial swarming in the wild"

Sabine Hauert

University of Bristol

Talk: "Trustworthy swarms for largescale environmental monitoring"

Gábor Vásárhelyi

CollMot Robotics Ltd. & Department of Biological Physics, Eötvös University, Budapest

Talk: "Skybrush - an open-core ecosystem for drone shows and large-scale aerial swarming missions"

Tutorials

Aerostack2

Aerostack2 is a framework built on ROS 2, offering a versatile and platform-independent environment for developing autonomous aerial robotics systems. Its modular software architecture and multi-robot orientation enable the integration of diverse capabilities for autonomous operation. Key contributions include a logical mission specification level, component and sub-system reuse, and the development of complete control architectures. Aerostack2 has been extensively tested in simulation and real flights with heterogeneous swarms. It is open source and community-oriented, fostering accessibility for autonomous drone developers.

Crazyswarm2

Crazyswarm2, built on ROS 2, controls Bitcraze Crazyflie drones. It continues the legacy of Crazyswarm (based on ROS 1) and offers improved connectivity to external ROS2 packages. With support for multiple positioning systems, it has a focus on precision swarm path-planning and execution. Additionally, it supports multiple backends and provides Python bindings for hybrid software in the loop, such that the step to the real-world is as small as possible. Notably, Crazyswarm2 also includes swarm monitoring tools for managing and observing drone swarms.'

Crazychoir

CrazyChoir is a Python framework based on ROS 2 that allows users to run experiments on swarms of Crazyflie nano-quadrotors, both in a virtual scenario, e.g., with Webots, and in a real one, including the support for MoCap Systems as, e.g., Vicon. CrazyChoir is a follow-up of ChoiRbot, a multi-robot ROS 2 toolbox, and provides features to develop and test distributed control and optimization tasks as, e.g., vehicle routing, formation control, for teams of Crazyflies. Key feature of the toolbox includes local communication among the nano-drones, optimization routines (via Disropt toolbox) and other single and multi-robot functionalities.