The crazycrowd project aimed to create an impressive and robust formation flying demonstration using Crazyflie drones in Visionen together with the motion capture system Qualisys. It should also be possible for external users to create new, similar demonstrations using the software developed in the project. Together with this a simulation environment was developed to be able to simulate the drones in real time. Below is a picture demonstrating the diffrent parts of the project and how they are linked to each other. As seen in the picture the project revolve around CrazySwarm , a platform developed to enable swarm-flying with Crazyflies.
The drones used in this project were Crazyflies version 2.1, an open source flying development platform. The drones weighs 27g and can fit in the palm of your hand. With a low-latency/long-range radio communication they are well suited for swarm-flying applications.
In order to perform formation flight the software requires information about the drones global positions. This project utilized the arena called visionen located in B-huset at Linköping University equipped with the motion capture system Qualisys. The Qualisys system uses cameras to track four markers placed on the drone which allows for estimation of position as well as roll, pitch and yaw.
The project resulted in an easy to use software for formation flight with drones in Visionen. With the Graphical User Interface, one can simulate and also execute formation flights from user-defined or preloaded missions. The GUI provides the option to switch to either manually control of the drones through an Xbox360-controller or let the drones autonomously follow trajectories.
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