Hi all — sharing an autonomous drone swarm we built around PX4 offboard control, in case the setup is useful to anyone doing multi-vehicle work.
We built a 5-drone swarm for the Swarm Drone Challenge 2026 (a capture-the-flag scenario) and finished 4th at ILA Berlin. Flight control is PX4 in offboard mode over MAVLink, with a ROS2 ground station running a deterministic commander that assigns swarm roles and streams waypoints to each drone.
Each drone carries a dual-ESP32 companion stack feeding the flight controller:
- ESP32-S3 — comms: micro-ROS + MAVLink offboard to the PX4 FC
- ESP32-P4 — onboard vision: ArUco marker detection at 320×240 (up to ~12 m) plus ToF obstacle sensing, no companion SBC
The dual-MCU split came out of v1.0: that build was ESP32-S3 only, and once vision was added we hit flash repartitioning headaches and serious thermal issues. v2.0 moved all the heavy vision work onto the P4 and left the S3 to handle comms only — which solved both.
Everything’s open-sourced — firmware, ground station, hardware, development photos, videos:
Technical report for finals submissions is attached bellow.
