Open source platform enables fast and agile drone swarms for navigation
SwarmNxt: Open-source Software-Hardware Platform for Fast and Agile Aerial Swarms
Robotics
Summary
Coordinating multiple flying robots, called drones, can help in emergencies by searching and mapping areas quickly and safely. Existing drones often don’t have open software or enough computing power onboard for advanced group navigation. The authors created SwarmNxt, a fully open-source system that combines drone hardware and software to let multiple drones fly together autonomously. Their system handles navigation, obstacle avoidance, and depth sensing all onboard, and they tested it successfully with groups of drones flying indoors. This platform aims to make drone swarm experiments easier and more accessible.
What this means in practice
- •For emergency response teams: Deploy drone swarms for rapid indoor search and mapping in GPS-denied, cluttered environments using onboard autonomous navigation.
- •For robotics developers: Build and test new algorithms for multi-drone coordination, planning, and vision-based navigation using a fully open-source hardware and software platform.
Authors
Charbel Toumieh, Niel Mistry, Benjamin Jarvis, Simon Jeger, Peize Liu, Shaojie Shen, Dario Floreano
Abstract
Aerial robot swarms have the potential to transform time-critical safety, security, and search-and-rescue operations. By coordinating multiple robots, they can rapidly survey disaster sites, map collapsed or GPS-denied environments, and search cluttered areas faster than a single robot, reducing response times and minimizing risks to first responders. Realizing this potential, however, requires robust autonomous swarm navigation, which remains an active research challenge. Progress is further constrained by existing platforms, as commercial drones are often closed-source or lack the onboard computational resources needed for agile, vision-based collective flight. Moreover, developing, deploying, and maintaining software across multiple aerial robots requires significant engineering effort. To address these challenges, we present SwarmNxt, an open-source software platform built on the open-source OmniNxt drone hardware. SwarmNxt provides an end-to-end toolkit, including detailed hardware assembly instructions with a video tutorial, automation tools for parallel software deployment and swarm-wide updates, and a ROS 2-based framework for autonomous navigation. The platform integrates state-of-the-art control, planning, and depth estimation into a single ROS 2 multi-agent system, providing an open research infrastructure for physical swarm experimentation. We validate SwarmNxt through two real-world experiments: a six-drone swarm performing decentralized planning with high-speed inter-drone collision avoidance, and a four-drone swarm executing collective flight with onboard depth estimation in an obstacle-filled environment. Both experiments were run indoors with global position from external motion capture; perception, planning, and control run onboard.