CoFlyers: A Universal Platform for Collective Flying of Swarm Drones

Swarm drones flying is a very attractive field of robotics research, motivated by natural bird flocking or other animal collective behaviors. In this paper, we propose and develop an open-source ^{1 1} https://github.com/micros-uav/CoFlyers universal platform CoFlyers for end-to-end whole-chain development from flocking-inspired models to real-drone swarm flying. In particular, CoFlyers is more user-friendly with only a unified programming language of MATLAB&Simulink, rather than several existing platforms with mixed programming languages or more efforts on raw functional modules. The prototype simulator of CoFlyers is implemented in MATLAB, allowing users to quickly develop and prototype swarm flying algorithms, and to conduct task-oriented parameter auto-tuning and batch processing within reproducible scenarios. Moreover, a real-world verification module of swarm drones is developed in Simulink as well, which directly calls the prototype simulator modules for code reuse. It connects the external platforms via a standardized user-datagram-protocol communication in-terface. As a case study, CoFlyers is utilized into a multi-drone collective flying scenario in confined environments, by implementing ROS&PX4&Gazebo for high-fidelity simulation and Optitrack&Tello-drones for experiments. Eventually, both simulation and experimental results have demonstrated and validated the user-friendly practicability of CoFlyers.