Setup and configuration of a swarm of autonomous UAVs in an indoor environment for distributed target estimation and tracking

The main objective of this thesis project is to develop a working configuration for a swarm of drones in an indoor flight environment. The swarm is composed of 4 small quadcopters, each equipped with an onboard computer that is able to run programs to control the drone movements, and also to communicate with all the other agents in the network, like a ground station and the other drones. The flight environment consists of a safety cage where drones can fly inside, and a Vicon motion capture system to locate the position and the orientation of each drone in order to have an external position feedback. The work concerned both hardware and software aspects of the drones, starting from the physical wiring of the boards to the software setup of each component, establishing also a communication framework using ROS 2. Another important aspect of the work is the integration of the Vicon system in order to accurately estimate the drones’ position. The secondary objective of this project focuses on the development of a task to be implemented on the former mentioned setup. First, an algorithm is implemented for a distributed estimation, with an information form Kalman filter, of the position of an ArUco marker on the ground. Then a flocking algorithm is used, in order to control the inter-drone distances and make the swarm follow the position of the ArUco marker. The aforementioned algorithms implement the work already proposed by the research group by Fausto Francesco Lizzio et al. in "Design and SITL Performance of an online Distributed Target Estimation for UAV Swarm". The aforementioned work has been tested by the authors only in simulation, therefore the implementation of the proposed algorithms on the drone environment in the laboratory has both the aim of proving the working setup, and also collecting the performance of the algorithm in a real-life scenario. This work has been accomplished in collaboration with Links Foundation which provided all the materials for the drones and the flight environment, which is a part of their Robotics Laboratory.