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Extension of a ground control interface for swarms of Small Drones

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Abstract

Although the technology for fully autonomous swarms of robots is rapidly progressing, the human operator will continue to play an important role during any swarming mission due to safety, monitoring and control constraints. In this paper, we present the set of features that a Ground Control Interface (GCI) must incorporate to allow monitoring, control and safety of outdoor missions with a swarm of Small Drones (drones of less than 1 kg). We propose a new extension to a widely used GCI by incorporating those features and we demonstrate its usage on a swarm of 10 Small Drones flying outdoor.

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Notes

  1. Link: https://www.faa.gov/uas/nprm/.

  2. http://www.librepilot.org/.

  3. http://www.qt.io/developers/.

  4. http://qgroundcontrol.org/.

  5. https://pixhawk.ethz.ch/.

  6. http://qgroundcontrol.org/mavlink/start.

  7. http://planner2.ardupilot.com/.

  8. https://wiki.paparazziuav.org/wiki/GCS.

  9. http://qgroundcontrol.org/mavlink/start.

  10. http://youtu.be/AE0KQHYT2MI.

  11. https://youtu.be/wsiyYRFHrSg.

  12. https://github.com/ndousse/qgroundcontrol.git.

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Acknowledgments

The work in this paper was supported by the myCopter project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Program (http://www.mycopter.eu) and by ArmaSuisse, competence sector Science + Technology for the Swiss Federal Department of Defense, Civil Protection and Sport. We would also like to acknowledge Meysam Basiri and Julien Lecoeur for their useful help in reviewing the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. EPFL STI IMT LIS, Station 9, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Nicolas Dousse, Grégoire Heitz & Dario Floreano

Authors
  1. Nicolas Dousse
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  2. Grégoire Heitz
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  3. Dario Floreano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicolas Dousse.

Additional information

This work was presented in part at the 1st International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics, Kyoto, Japan, October 28–30, 2015.

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Dousse, N., Heitz, G. & Floreano, D. Extension of a ground control interface for swarms of Small Drones. Artif Life Robotics 21, 308–316 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-016-0302-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-016-0302-9

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