Swarical: An Integrated Hierarchical Approach to Localizing Flying Light Specks
This work addresses the problem of efficient and accurate localization for swarms of miniature drones, which is crucial for applications like shape illumination, but the improvement is incremental over existing decentralized techniques.
Swarical is a hierarchical swarm-based localization technique for Flying Light Specks (FLSs) that enables accurate and efficient localization for illuminating 2D/3D shapes. It achieves over 2x faster localization compared to a state-of-the-art decentralized method while maintaining comparable accuracy.
Swarical, a Swarm-based hierarchical localization technique, enables miniature drones, known as Flying Light Specks (FLSs), to accurately and efficiently localize and illuminate complex 2D and 3D shapes. Its accuracy depends on the physical hardware (sensors) of FLSs, which are used to track neighboring FLSs in order to localize themselves. It uses the hardware specification to convert mesh files into point clouds that enable a swarm of FLSs to localize at the highest accuracy afforded by their hardware. Swarical considers a heterogeneous mix of FLSs with different orientations for their tracking sensors, ensuring a line of sight between a localizing FLS and its anchor FLS. We present an implementation using Raspberry cameras and ArUco markers. A comparison of Swarical with a state of the art decentralized localization technique shows that it is as accurate and more than 2x faster.