AirSwarm: Enabling Cost-Effective Multi-UAV Research with COTS drones

Abstract-- Traditional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm missions rely heavily on expensive custom-made drones with onboard perception or external positioning systems, limiting their widespread adoption in research and education. To address this issue, we propose AirSwarm. Key innovations include a hierarchical control architecture for reliable multi-UAV coordination, an infrastructure-free visual SLAM system for precise localization without external motion capture, and a ROS-based software framework for simplified swarm development. Experiments demonstrate cm-level tracking accuracy, low-latency control, communication failure resistance, formation flight, and trajectory tracking. By reducing financial and technical barriers, AirSwarm makes multi-robot education and research more accessible.