Paparazzi: how to make a swarm of Parrot AR Drones fly autonomously based on GPS.

The Parrot AR drone 2 is a commercially available quad rotor with many sensors onboard, such as two cameras, accelerometers, gyrometers, barometer, and a magnetometer. Recently, a GPS-module has become available, which can be used to geo-tag images. We have adapted the particularly versatile and powerful Paparazzi open source autopilot for use with the Parrot AR drone. Hence, just by uploading software to the drone, it is able to perform GPS-based autonomous outdoor flight. In this article, we explain the inner workings of the adapted autopilot and what procedure a user should follow for performing experiments with a swarm of AR drones.