Onboard Controller Design for Nano UAV Swarm in Operator-Guided Collective Behaviors

In this paper, we present a swarm of Crazyflie nano-drones. The swarm can show various collective behaviors: Flocking, gradient following, going to a chosen point, formation, and scattered search of the environment. The methodology behind the behaviors is executed entirely on-board. Crazyflies use a common radio channel to share positions with each other. If desired, an operator can use the same channel and start, end, change or guide the collective behaviors online during the flight. We use the virtual force vectors and modify the way they are combined to achieve different behaviors instead of developing unique algorithms for each. This allows us to develop more collective behavior types with less effort. In the results, we show a detailed analysis of the behaviors and assess the coordination and the safety of the agents in addition to the performance as a collective. We conclude that our swarm of 6 Crazyflies was successful in the desired behaviors.