An Agile Low-cost Testbed for Multi-Drone Target Tracking

Abstract

Most existing aerial robotics testbeds have significant set-up and maintenance costs that restrict their use. This paper presents a low-cost multi-drone testbed for agile and safe performing proof-of-concept experiments. It uses low-weight, low-size Crazyflies drones and low-cost lighthouse positioning system for drone pose estimations. Its flexible and modular ROS-based architecture can be used to easily test multi-drone perception, control and planning techniques and can easily integrate bigger drones. The presented testbed does not require a dedicated room and can be set-up in less than one hour. The paper presents the testbed and validates its operation with multi-drone target tracking experiments.