Flexible Drones

Flexible Drones is an open source ROS 2 framework for coordinating heterogeneous drone swarms through shared action, service, and status interfaces. The stack centers on a modular orchestrator that launches and supervises one manager per drone, while each manager exposes consistent commands and structured feedback that higher-level behaviors can react to during execution.

The workspace is organized as a family of focused flexible_drones* packages. flexible_drones_core provides the orchestrator, registry parsing, process supervision, and abstract manager API. flexible_drones_msgs defines the common ROS 2 messages, services, and actions used across the stack. flexible_drones_deployment owns the project roster, named deployment setups, and example trajectories, while flexible_drones_description provides shared URDF/xacro assets, meshes, gates, and RViz launch support.

Backend packages connect the common orchestration layer to specific runtimes: flexible_drones_crazyflie brings up real Crazyflie hardware, flexible_drones_gazebo provides a kinematic multi-drone simulation, and flexible_drones_optitrack publishes motion-capture poses for external tracking workflows. Supporting packages include flexible_drones_tools for monitoring, logging, trajectory utilities, and one-shot ROS clients, plus flexible_drones_flexbe for reusable FlexBE states and behaviors built on top of the core swarm interfaces.

Repository Status

This repository is currently a public landing page and coordination point for the Flexible Drones workspace. The implementation packages are being prepared for consolidation here, with the public release planned for May 2026.

Coming May 2026

• flexible_drones_msgs
  • Shared actions, services, and messages for drone and swarm control
• flexible_drones_core
  • Orchestrator, manager supervision, registry loading, and generic manager base classes
• flexible_drones_description
  • URDF/xacro models, meshes, gates, RViz configs, and shared description launch helpers
• flexible_drones_deployment
  • Canonical drone roster, named deployment setups, and project trajectories
• flexible_drones_crazyflie
  • Crazyflie hardware managers, launch flows, and Crazyflie-specific defaults
• flexible_drones_gazebo
  • Kinematic Gazebo simulation backend for mixed drone fleets
• flexible_drones_optitrack
  • OptiTrack/NatNet pose publishing for motion-capture-backed workflows
• flexible_drones_tools
  • Monitoring, logging, trajectory, plotting, and command-line client utilities
• flexible_drones_flexbe
  • FlexBE states, behaviors, and behavior-expansion utilities for autonomous workflows

Publication

E. R. Faith, A. B. Kooiker, A. J. Farney, S. Fox, E. Grimes and D. C. Conner, "Flexible Drones: ROS 2 Action-Based Coordination of Multiple Heterogeneous Drones," SoutheastCon 2026, Huntsville, AL, USA, 2026, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/SoutheastCon63549.2026.11476332.

@inproceedings{FlexibleDrones2026,
  author = {Faith, E. R. and Kooiker, A. B. and Farney, A. J. and Fox, S. and Grimes, E. and Conner, D. C.},
  title = {Flexible Drones: ROS 2 Action-Based Coordination of Multiple Heterogeneous Drones},
  booktitle = {SoutheastCon 2026},
  address = {Huntsville, AL, USA},
  year = {2026},
  pages = {1--6},
  doi = {10.1109/SoutheastCon63549.2026.11476332}
}

Contributors

Capable Humanitarian Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab (CHRISLab) Christopher Newport University

• E. R. Faith
• A. B. Kooiker
• A. J. Farney
• S. Fox
• E. Grimes
• D. C. Conner

License

This project is released under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.