The problem
Swarm research dies on logistics: ten aircraft that each need flashing, binding and battery nursing before a single formation flight, then produce logs that aren’t time synchronized across the fleet. The science is distributed estimation and control — the friction is everything around it.
What the application demands
- Repeatable fleet setup — identical airframes, identical firmware, one imaging process for the whole fleet. The Sunray line ships from the same PX4 stable release with all source open, so every aircraft in the fleet runs byte-identical firmware.
- Onboard compute per aircraft — each Sunray carries an Intel N150 x86 computer with ROS preinstalled, so formation controllers run onboard instead of on a ground station.
- Safe close formation — full propeller guards make indoor close-formation experiments survivable. Contact is a non-event, not a rebuild.
- One dev environment — the same ROS graph across simulation (Gazebo) and every vehicle, with one-key takeoff / hover / trajectory interfaces and demo routines (waypoint, square, circular, hexagonal) included.
Recommended configuration
| Role | Product | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Compact fleet | Sunray-150 | 150 mm, ~750 g, agile in tight formations and small arenas |
| Drone + UGV swarm lab | Zhiqun RMTT | Complete motion-capture swarm platform: RMTT drones, ground vehicles, ORCA formation, Gazebo |
| Larger payloads / LiDAR swarm | Sunray-300 | 300 mm frame, LiDAR variant with MID-360 for perception-heavy swarm tasks |
A typical lab kit: 6–10 Sunray aircraft, identical firmware images, and the included Sunray ground station for fleet monitoring. Labs that need heterogeneous air–ground swarms or a turnkey motion-capture setup start with the Zhiqun RMTT platform instead. Formation controllers written in simulation transfer to the fleet unchanged, and free online training gets the first cohort flying.
