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. AirSwarm democratizes multi-drone coordination using low-cost commercially available drones such as Tello or Anafi, enabling affordable swarm aerial robotics research and education. 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. The complete instructions and open source code will be available at
View on arXiv@article{li2025_2503.06890,
title={ AirSwarm: Enabling Cost-Effective Multi-UAV Research with COTS drones },
author={ Xiaowei Li and Kuan Xu and Fen Liu and Ruofei Bai and Shenghai Yuan and Lihua Xie },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06890},
year={ 2025 }
}