Researchers Fly 50 Autonomous Planes Simultaneously

New submitter MagicRuB writes: Researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA recently flew fifty small autonomous planes together in what they claim is a "record-breaking drone swarm". These aircraft were built from lightweight foam wings with hobby-grade components, and were equipped with an autopilot running firmware based on the open-source Ardupilot project as well as a companion computer running custom autonomy software built on top of ROS and an 802.11n wireless device to communicate with other planes and ground stations. The researchers are using this swarm as a platform for advancing drone technology, and hope to see results implemented in agriculture, search and rescue, and defense applications.

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Re:Fly or stand by?

[fhage]

Find more details here The planes used a Linux based autopilot to control the aircraft which had waypoints sent to it via onboard Odroid SBCs. Primary communication to and from the planes used UDP packets sent through USB WiFi adaptors hung off the Odroids

2 people "operated" the swarm, one commanding, the other monitoring. Planes got their swarm "slot" assignments at launch and tried to maintain position relative to a lead aircraft once they had reached their slot altitude. It's an interesting read. A quick estimate suggests they put around $1k in hardware into each plane. They describe guiding planes manually via spotter pilots using a secondary 900MHz spread spectrum radio link when anything went wrong.

All planes were programmed with the same landing point, with the assumption that GPS and barometer inaccuracy would provide sufficient spread on landing. But with nearly 50 planes on the runway, on-deck collisions were unavoidable. Some of the video captured by GoPro cameras mounted to the nose of each plane show skidding into other planes, or coming down directly on top of other planes on the ground. Lesson learned for next time: add a bit more variation to the landing coordinates.