Networking-Enabling Enhancement for a Swarm of COTS Drones

This paper presents the augmentation of a commercial-of-the-self (COTS) multi-rotor unmanned aerial system (UAS) to extend its capabilities by introducing increased on-board processing power. The option to process sensor information on-board reduces the required bandwidth by only communicating relevant or important information and therefore increases the level of UAS autonomy. It also enables adaptive reactive abilities for a group of UAS executing a coordinated, collaborative or cooperative mission. This paper describes an effort to integrate a small board computer, more specifically, an Odroid C2 with the COTS 3DR Solo drone, and reviews the achieved enhanced capabilities of such a system. This is an extension of a traditional autopilot, as such, the original Ardupilot hardware and software is not modified in this work.