CK-YAN: A Quadrotor UAV Swarm Testbed for Cooperative Algorithms

As one of the key technologies of UAV swarm, the collaborative algorithms are of great significance in collision avoidance, formation controlling and so on. However, due to the high risk of real-world UAV swarm testing, the performance of the collaborative algorithms is hardly verified in reality. In this work, we developed an experimental testbed, named “CK-YAN”, for UAV swarm collaborative algorithms. CK-YAN is composed of two main parts, the UAV control system and the ground control system. In the UAV control system, a self-built network module with Flask framework is developed to enable the collaborative communications among UAVs. In the ground control system, the Dronekit and MAVProxy are implemented to reduce the flying risk and controlling difficulty of UAVs. We also developed a visualization module to reflect the 3D virtual scene of the testing UAVs in real time. The experimental results demonstrate the high stability of CK-YAN and verify the performance of the collaborative algorithm.