Fast and In Sync: Periodic Swarm Patterns for Quadrotors
This addresses the challenge of creating synchronized and flexible swarm motions for applications like aerial displays, though it is incremental in combining existing algorithms.
The paper tackled the problem of designing coordinated swarm performances for quadrotors by developing a framework for choreography creation, validated experimentally on a swarm of 25 drones.
This paper aims to design quadrotor swarm performances, where the swarm acts as an integrated, coordinated unit embodying moving and deforming objects. We divide the task of creating a choreography into three basic steps: designing swarm motion primitives, transitioning between those movements, and synchronizing the motion of the drones. The result is a flexible framework for designing choreographies comprised of a wide variety of motions. The motion primitives can be intuitively designed using few parameters, providing a rich library for choreography design. Moreover, we combine and adapt existing goal assignment and trajectory generation algorithms to maximize the smoothness of the transitions between motion primitives. Finally, we propose a correction algorithm to compensate for motion delays and synchronize the motion of the drones to a desired periodic motion pattern. The proposed methodology was validated experimentally by generating and executing choreographies on a swarm of 25 quadrotors.