What's new?

What's new from our previous work in 2022 this year?

For the continuation of our project, we chose to maintain a complete single documentation, with everything the user will need to access our platform. With this, we guarantee the centralization of information related to Swarm in Blocks from the installation to the theory behind our algorithms. However, with this, we are aware that we can overshadow the changes we made this year and lose count of what is new. Therefore, this section will detail precisely "What's new?".

Well, at the outset it is worth noting that our project has two realities of action: The development of algorithms for our platform and the efforts to make Swarm Real possible. Because both are part of our dream of expanding Swarm in Blocks in order to make it a platform that simplifies the main obstacles of working in swarms, we decided to work on these two fronts.

After a thorough analysis of the problems we faced in deploying the real swarm, we listed these problems and now we will present our approach in terms of design to these problems.

ProblemOur Solution

Possible collision between drones (lack of safety especially for large Swarms)

Collision Avoidance System

Giant clutter to keep track of all Clovers in a swarm individually (several terminals, many simultaneous computers with several people to keep track of)

Swarm Station

Lack of basic features for handling a swarm pre-implemented in the Clover platform (such as access to battery data and raspberry computational power)

Full integration of low level data in our Swarm Station

Lack of security in indoor tests regarding the limitation of physical space (walls and objects) in the Swarm region

Safe Area Pop Up in Swarm Station

Decentralization of information and platforms for access

Web Homepage

Difficulty configuring physical drones for swarm

Our complete documentation with pre-designed settings for swarms in our repo image

Lack of a center for reports of successful tests with swarms of drones for the Clover platform describing the test conditions (odometry, etc.)

Our Show off section in this Gitbook

And many other solutions are also featured on our platform, for more information please follow the rest of this documentation. By the way, all of the solutions described above are described clearly and in detail throughout this Gitbook. We recommend reading in order to understand the fundamental precepts of our platform.

Within that scenario, we've basically changed almost all of the described sections to readapt our platform for the scope change we've described. Therefore, if you are still in doubt about what is new for this year, follow the list below with the main changes in our documentation:

  • ▶️ Introduction: We completely reformulated for the new project;

  • ⚙️ Installation: Reformulation of the installation with all the changes we made this year (in addition to fixing some dependencies that were broken. Addition of a session for configuring the Real Swarm deployment Network;

  • 💻Usability: Updates to the Blocks IDE section, complete redesign of the new Homepage and addition of the Swarm Station, a relatively large new page with an entire subplatform;

  • 📚 Background Theory: The Overview section has been completely revised, adapting the structural changes we made to Swarm Real, including network settings and our drone connection solution. In Systems, the biggest addition is Collision Avoidance which basically tells all the details of our entire algorithm. In addition, the renewal of the FPV is also present in this section, both with its new way of accessing it and with its own documentation;

  • 📖 Cases: This new section serves as a background to facilitate new users on our platform, as well as a presentation of our latest developments with the test project in question. In this section we present examples to be tested at simulation level, as well as a Show-off section of our platform, with a description of our tests and our results;

  • 🚀 Applications: With the face-to-face validation of our project, we made our documentation more robust in terms of classic applications at the industry level, in the way that swarms can be applied, both in educational and commercial use;

  • 🔓 Closure: We readjusted our closure to the changes in the project.

In addition, finally, to fully understand all our development, an analytical look at our GitHub repository is also highly recommended. Another feature that we added this year to our documentation is a specific README for each Package created inside the Swarm in Blocks platform, so we ensure that the user can have a thorough understanding of specific parts of our development.

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