Crazyswarm is a swarm of 49 Crazyflie 2.0 nano-quadcopters operating in a new experimental robotics building at USC.

We localize the quadcopters with a Vicon motion-capture system and a custom object tracker that supports identical marker arrangements. Three shared radios broadcast position updates at 100Hz and send high-level trajectory commands to each vehicle. Vicon-IMU sensor fusion, trajectory evaluation, and position control are all performed onboard at 500Hz.

The rotating pyramid demo is built from ellipse commands. The USC letters demo is built from point-to-point commands with each vehicle planning fifth-order polynomial trajectories onboard. A Python scripting layer controls the overall sequence of events.

A forthcoming publication from our group will describe the components of this system, the platform constraints, tradeoffs, and the associated design decisions in detail.