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Swarical, a Swarm-based hierarchical localization technique, enables miniature drones, Flying Light Specks (FLSs), to accurately and efficiently localize and illuminate complex 2D and 3D shapes. Its accuracy depends on the physical hardware (sensors) of FLSs used to track neighboring FLSs to localize themselves. It uses the specification of the sensors to convert mesh files into point clouds that enable a swarm of FLSs to localize at the highest accuracy afforded by their sensors. Swarical considers a heterogeneous mix of FLSs with different orientations for their tracking sensors, ensuring a line of sight between a localizing FLS and its anchor FLS. We present an implementation using Raspberry cameras and ArUco markers. A comparison of Swarical with a state of the art decentralized localization technique shows that it is as accurate and more than 2x faster.
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This content will become publicly available on October 27, 2026
Reproducibility Companion Paper: Swarical: An Integrated Hierarchical Approach to Localizing Flying Light Specks
This companion paper provides artifacts and instructions on replicating the experiments in the ACM Multimedia 2024 paper entitled "Swarical: An Integrated Hierarchical Approach to Localizing Flying Light Specks." Swarm-based hierarchical, Swarical, is a localization technique that enables miniature drones, Flying Light Specks (FLSs), to accurately and efficiently localize and illuminate complex 2D and 3D shapes. It consists of two components, an offline planner and an online localization technique that executes on an FLS. The offline planner uses the FLS sensor specification for positioning to convert mesh files into swarms of FLSs. Some FLSs are dark and used only for localization. We reported the online localization technique to be fast and highly accurate. We describe how to reproduce this finding using our artifacts.
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- PAR ID:
- 10695731
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400720352
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 13677 to 13681
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Localization Flying Light Speck Dronevision Swarm 3D Display
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Dublin Ireland
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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