I don't know much about the drone space to be quite honest but I always wondered what it would cost to mess around with swarm algorithms, on actual drones, without breaking the bank.
Any pointers?
IMO, a lot. Moving things are hard, and drones especially, are _very_ damn hard. One mistake and the drone goes poof! It gets frustrating after a while.
Just some pointers if you want to do this:
- you need some companion computer on your drone.
- GPS alone is not precise enough, you'll get wierd drifts from it all the time, you want something like RTK GPS to be able to keep stuff together.
- If you want your positioning to relie on vision, get a global shutter camera, a rolling shutter will make your life harder than it needs to be.
With ArduBee initiative we are making our best to innovate creating our best solution for swarming, with micro drones, indoor and even outdoor, based on Ardupilot Open Source project. If you have a look at https://ardupilot.org/copter/ you could start to have an idea of the included potential.
