Towards a swarm of agile micro quadrotors

We describe a prototype 75 g micro quadrotor with onboard attitude estimation and control that operates autonomously with an external localization system. The motivation for designing quadrotors at this scale comes from two observations. First, the agility of the robot increases with a reduction in size, a fact that is supported by experimental results in this paper. Second, smaller robots are able to operate in tight formations in constrained, indoor environments. We describe the hardware and software used to operate the vehicle as well our dynamic model. We also discuss the aerodynamics of vertical flight and the contribution of ground effect to the vehicle performance. Finally, we discuss architecture and algorithms to coordinate a team of these quadrotors, and provide experimental results for a team of 20 micro quadrotors.