SwarmBox

SwarmBox is an open-source drone swarm framework that aims to decouple high-level swarm logic from low-level flight control and provide a swarm-level integrated analyzer to facilitate debugging and reproducible experimentation.

SwarmBox: A Plug-and-Play Drone Swarm Framework for Streamlined Development and Comprehensive Analysis (To Appear).
Minki Lee, Seojin Lee, and Seulbae Kim.
In Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2026),
Montreal, Canada, July 2026.

code GitHub docs Paper archive Archive slideshow Videos

Please be advised: SwarmBox is currently in its early stages of development, and there might be some rough edges. We are actively working on improving the framework and will be updating the repository with more features, documentation, and examples in the near future.

Introduction

While drone swarms are emerging as a paradigm-shifting technology, progress in research is often constrained by a fragmented development ecosystem. Every new algorithm requires a bespoke testbed, introducing redundant engineering overhead and making results difficult to reproduce. As a remedy, we present SwarmBox, an open-source framework that provides a shared foundation for swarm robotics.

SwarmBox Overview

By offering a plug-and-play architecture, a swarm-level integrated analyzer, and configurable experimentation environments, SwarmBox streamlines development and empowers reproducible, community-driven swarm research.

Demo

Watch the full demo video playlist on YouTube

Deep Dive into SwarmBox

For quick setup instructions, please refer to the Getting Started.
For detailed documentation, including architecture overview and usage examples, will be available soon. Please stay tuned for updates!

Cite this work

If you find SwarmBox useful for your research, please consider citing our paper: (pdf, DOI):

@article{lee2026swarmbox,
    author = {Lee, Minki and Lee, Seojin and Kim, Seulbae},
    title = "{SwarmBox}: A Plug-and-Play Drone Swarm Framework 
             for Streamlined Development and Comprehensive Analysis",
    year = {2026},
    issue_date = {July 2026},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    volume = {3},
    number = {FSE},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3808100},
    doi = {10.1145/3808100},
    journal = {Proc. ACM Softw. Eng.},
    articleno = {FSE093},
    numpages = {22},
    keywords = {Framework, Swarm, Drone, Cyber-Physical Systems, Distributed CPS}
}

Open Source License

As the goal of this project is to facilitate the research and development of drone swarm systems, SwarmBox is an open-source project licensed under the MIT License. Please feel free to use, modify, and distribute this software in accordance with the terms of the MIT License.

See the LICENSE for more details.

Zenodo Artifact

The fully packaged dataset and integrated execution environment for reproducing the results in our FSE 2026 paper are available on 10.5281/zenodo.19344308.

Upcoming Features

The following features are currently under development or considered for future releases. We will update the repository with these features as they become available.

  • In-Progress
    • Support for multi-layered DDS architecture for hierarchical swarm systems
  • Planned
    • Hardware setup guide and description for real-world drone swarm deployment
    • Support for Recent ROS 2 Distributions and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
    • Support for ArduPilot for broader hardware compatibility
  • Exploring
    • Support for zenoh middleware for better performance and scalability