We will be going to ICRA 2023, London on the May 29 - June 1! We will be located at booth H 10.
Moreover, we helped organize the ICRA Workshop The Role of Robotics Simulators for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on the June 2nd. Check out the workshop website for more info.
Decentralized Swarm Demo
What we will show shown at our booth was a fully decentralized swarm demo where we showed of several items:
- The lighthouse positioning system for onboard positioning: We have showed these a couple of times but now we were able to fly with the latest improvements (see this blogpost).
- Peer to peer communication: The crazyflies were communicating with eachother with the peer to peer functionality. This was used to indicate eachothers state and position. Here they arrange together who will take off and who will not.
- Inter drone avoidance: The p2p position sharing was used for in air obstacle avoidance with eachother. This is using the collision avoidance module written by James Preiss of University of Southern California (see this PR).
The ground work for this awesome demo was done by our 2022 summer intern Marios Stamatopoulos who has written more details in his blogpost. We have improved this demo further after our attendance at IROS 2022, which can read in this blogpost
Video of Demo
Here is a video of the demo from IROS 2022
Products used in the demo
The following products are used in the demo, are available for purchase in our store.
The Crazyflie 2.1
The Crazyflie 2.1 is a small, flexible quadrotor, suitable for research and education. The small size and light weight makes it safe and robust if crashing, while the open source software opens up the possibility to modify or examine any part of the functionality.
The Lighthouse positioning system
The Lighthouse Positioning System is based on the Valve Lighthouse base stations, used in the SteamVR gaming kit. It has very high precision and accuracy to an affordable price, making it possible to use in any office or class room. The position is estimated in the Crazyflie quadrotor which makes the system robust and easy to use.
The Qi 1.2 wireless charging deck
The Qi 1.2 wireless charging deck uses the same standard as mobile phones which makes it easy to find a compatible charger.
The Crazyradio PA
The Crazyradio PA is a USB dongle radio that is used to communicate with the Crazyflie. It supports up to 800 packets/s to multiple Crazyflies simultaneously.
The charging pad
The charging pads are based on the wireless charger “NORDMÄRKE” from IKEA with a 3D-printed pad. The FreeCad and stl files for the pad are available on GitHub in Landing_pad_rallen_v5.fcstd and Landing_pad_v5.stl.
New products
We will bring some of more products that are cooking in the Bitcraze pots at the moment.
- Crazyflie Brushless Prototype
- Flapper drone (based on the Crazyflie Bolt), soon availabe for purchase in our store.
- Thrust upgrade kit