Cloud-Based Control of Drone Swarm with Localization via Ultra-Wideband

Nowadays, aerial and ground robots can be made cheaper and lighter which makes it possible to deploy them in large numbers and drone swarms have the potential to increase efficiency and safety in certain applications, as well as provide new capabilities that would not be possible with a single drone. Successful implementation of swarm cooperative applications requires low-latency communications and real-time localization. In this paper, we proposed a cloud-based control system architecture to dynamically control the drone swarm or UAV formation in the 3D space using the mobile application. A group of UAVs determines their location using an integrated ultra-wideband module. The base station is connected to the cloud platform (google firebase in our case) which is again connected to a mobile app to get the position and formation commands directly from the user using an interactive interface. The base station will get these commands and position control information from the cloud. The base station then sends the next setpoint to each UAV, enabling UAVs to form a real-time user-controlled formation and fly autonomously until the next command. Our experiment results show that the latency in this architecture is in a range of 0.8 to 1.41 sec. with fixed anchors, the localization error is less than 5 cm.