Swarm of drones
-
Hello
my name is Matteo and I'm planning to buy many items of your kit "VOXL m500 - Development Drone for PX4 GPS-Denied Navigation and Obstacle Avoidance" to implement a swarm of drones.
I had the chance to browse your documentation about the VOXL 500 to understand if it is possible to put in direct communication two or more VOXL m500 drones but I couldn't understand it (I don't want to get through the ground station). I saw a configuration file on the drone in which it is specified the IP address of the ground station and I realized that the communication with another drone is not achiaveable. Am I wrong? In case it is possible, which protocol could be used? DDS? ROS? MavLink? Is there any example of swarm of drones with one of your product? I'm looking for something already available, that has been proved.
Regards
Matteo -
@Matteo-F Hi Matteo, this functionality won't be available out of the box. You will need to implement yourself. Microhard says they support meshing, but we have not tried it. There are also methods to mesh using wifi, but you'll have to implement
-
@Moderator Hello, thanks for the quick reply. I'll think about your suggestions.
For now the scenario I have in mind is built on top of 5 drones. One drone would be considered the leader of the swarm. I'm planning to have a laptop running as WiFi router. Through DHCP protocol, all 5 drones would be able to get a dynamic IP address on the same subnet built by the laptop? I'd like the laptop could work also as Ground Station.
Would be possible from the shell of a generic drone in my subnet to ping all other drones?
What if I build a simple client app based on UDP on a drone and a server app on another drone, would they be able to communicate directly?
Can I send the commands to the 'drone leader' directly from the Ground Station? I'm planning to have the other drones following the leader by reading its position/state.
In your opinion, what are the possible problems of this solution and how far would I be from having my swarm of drones? -
@Matteo-F The VOXL on the m500 is running Linux and has a standard Linux networking stack so you should definitely be able to do a lot of that.
