The proliferation of unmanned vehicles on the market, particularly quadrotors, had led to increased interest in multi-vehicle research and applications. The abilities for thinking and talking amongst the vehicles in a swarm require infrastructure support of the system’s computation and communication. This technical whitepaper aims to shed light on the thinking (computation) and talking (communication) framework for multi-vehicle research. The authors explore:
- Centralized and distributed computation enabled by recent trends in micro-controller board development
- Communication frameworks, including inter-nodal communication paradigms and mediums
- The adaptability of the computation and communication framework for different swarm approaches
- Common applications of the framework, such as vision-based object-tracking and formation flights
