Visual Inertial Odometry Swarm: An Autonomous Swarm of Vision-Based Quadrotors

Abstract

In this letter, we present the system infrastructure for a swarm of quadrotors, which perform all estimation on board using monocular visual inertial odometry. This is a novel system since it does not require an external motion capture system or GPS and is able to execute formation tasks without inter-robot collisions. The swarm can be deployed in nearly any indoor or outdoor scenario and is scalable to higher numbers of robots. We discuss the system architecture, estimation, planning, and control for the multirobot system. The robustness and scalability of the approach is validated in both indoor and outdoor environments with up to 12 quadrotors.