Quadcopters Real Time Communiation

[Teo Protoulis]

Hello everyone,

we are trying to get a project running where we need to be able to have communication between quadcopters in real time (swarm of drones). We have decided to use Raspberry Pis along with Navio2 flight controller and flash the Ardupilot code in order for the Pi to work with Navio. Is it possible to use MAVLink and write extra code to exchange information between the drones in real time like position or altitude for example ?

Any other approaches/ideas would be really welcome!

Teo

[Hamish Willee]

Hi Teo

Yes.

The drones will already be outputting their position, probably using https://mavlink.io/en/messages/common.html#GLOBAL_POSITION_INT or https://mavlink.io/en/messages/common.html#GPS_RAW (or maybe both). You would check using Mission Planner/QGC GCSs or ask on the ArduPilot discord #mavlink channel.

Note however that:
1. YOu can only have 255 systems on a MAVLink network - so if your swarm is bigger than that you'll need to think about ways of routing information.
2. Drones emit information to each other but generally do not "command" each other (it is possible, but generally not done). What that means is that each of your drones can navigate away from each other, but if you want one drone to tell another to "move out of the way", that would require additional coding.

Regards

Hamish