Documentation for SwarmBox
This documentation is designed for researchers and developers who want to use SwarmBox as a practical platform for real swarm-drone development workflows.
The focus is on:
- building and running swarm scenarios quickly,
- understanding where to customize behavior,
- operating simulation and real-world deployments safely,
- and troubleshooting common integration issues.
The focus is not on reproducing paper artifacts. If you are looking for publication artifacts, see the project main page and Zenodo links.
Who This Guide Is For
- Researchers prototyping and evaluating swarm system components.
- Developers integrating custom mission logic into a ROS 2 and PX4-based stack.
Currently, SwarmBox supports only the PX4 flight stack, but we plan to carefully craft the modular joint architecture to support other robotic stacks in the future.
Table of Contents
We recommend reading the documentation in order, but you can also jump to specific sections as needed. The following is a suggested reading order:
The documentation is still under development, and some sections are incomplete. Sections marked with a 🚧 are works in progress and will be updated soon.
- 🚧 Getting Started
- 🚧 Architecture Overview
- 🚧 Mission Configuration
- Network Configuration
- 🚧 Implementing Custom Logic
- 🚧 Execution
a. 🚧 SITL Simulation
b. 🚧 Hardware Deployment - 🚧 Troubleshooting
What You Will Learn
- How SwarmBox separates swarm-level logic from low-level flight control.
- How to configure swarm scenarios using mission config files.
- How to run and manage multi-drone SITL sessions.
- How to prepare for simulation-to-real transitions.
- How to avoid common setup and networking pitfalls.
Start Here
If you are new to the project, begin with Getting Started and aim to complete one successful SITL run first.