CrazyChoir: Flying Swarms of Crazyflie Quadrotors in ROS 2

TL;DR

CrazyChoir is a modular ROS 2-based Python framework enabling simulation, control, and experimentation with swarms of Crazyflie nano-quadrotors for various cooperative tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, modular toolkit for simulating and controlling Crazyflie swarms, including real-time communication, planning, and online distributed optimization capabilities.

Findings

Validated through simulations and real experiments

Demonstrated formation control and trajectory tracking

Enabled online distributed control schemes

Abstract

This paper introduces CrazyChoir, a modular Python framework based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2. The toolbox provides a comprehensive set of functionalities to simulate and run experiments on teams of cooperating Crazyflie nano-quadrotors. Specifically, it allows users to perform realistic simulations over robotic simulators as, e.g., Webots and includes bindings of the firmware control and planning functions. The toolbox also provides libraries to perform radio communication with Crazyflie directly inside ROS 2 scripts. The package can be thus used to design, implement and test planning strategies and control schemes for a Crazyflie nano-quadrotor. Moreover, the modular structure of CrazyChoir allows users to easily implement online distributed optimization and control schemes over multiple quadrotors. The CrazyChoir package is validated via simulations and experiments on a swarm of Crazyflies for formation control, pickup-and-delivery vehicle routing and trajectory tracking tasks. CrazyChoir is available at https://github.com/OPT4SMART/crazychoir.