Results screenshotted from our Swarm Management & Communication Projects in action with two real-world drones.
Hello ArduPilot Community!
We are Ethan @ethochal5 and Izzy, Mech & Aero MEng students at Durham University, excited to introduce the work we’ve done for our final-year dissertation projects exploring low-cost drone swarm communication and management, supervised by Dr @Oliver_vogt. Our work is focused on making drone swarming more accessible using low-cost hardware and open-source software.
Our Projects
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Communication (Ethan) - The aim of this project is to design a reproducible, low-cost, open-source drone swarm communication system, that can be implemented in both SITL simulations and on low-cost hardware. The system enables two drones to communicate in real time, using a WiFi network, and use shared data to coordinate movements, forming a foundation for more advanced swarm behaviours.
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Management (Izzy) - This aimed at researching swarm simulations in Mission Planner, MAVProxy & QGC to understand the capabilities of swarm management in each GCS before identifying the potential to expand the ArduPilot WebTool Telemetry Dashboard created by @iampete for multiple vehicles*.* The latter half of the project focused on developing Telemetry Dashboard by implementing a vehicle class, creating a vehicle info popup, colour system and primary vehicle selector without compromising any of Telemetry Dashboard’s inherent customisability. More details about the modifications made to Telemetry Dashboard can be found on the ReadMe page.
Both projects use a standard Ardupilot setup and have both been successful in SITL and real-world environments with videos coming soon! We’ve provided a combined setup document for both projects giving full step-by-step instructions of how to replicate both the communication and management system which you can find here Drone Swarm Communication & Management Experimental Setup. We hope that the project can be replicated, adapted and improved by using this document. The link to our GitHub repos can be found here: Low Cost Drone Swarm Communication and Low Cost Drone Swarm Management.
If you are interested in replicating or building upon our work, the attached guide contains everything you need to get started and we would love to hear any feedback, questions or suggestions anyone has 
(please note that the project submission date is the end of April therefore, minor changes may be made before then)