Reproducibility Companion Paper: Swarical: An Integrated Hierarchical Approach to Localizing Flying Light Specks

2026-05-25

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of achieving efficient and accurate collaborative localization and illumination by fleets of micro flying robots—referred to as Flying Light Specks (FLSs)—within complex 2D/3D geometric environments. The authors propose Swarical, a novel swarm-based hierarchical framework that maps a mesh model to an FLS formation through offline path planning. Crucially, the approach designates a subset of non-emitting (“dark”) FLSs to perform lightweight online localization, thereby supporting emitting FLSs in realizing high-precision collaborative illumination. Experimental results across diverse scenarios demonstrate significant improvements in both localization efficiency and accuracy. The study further enhances reproducibility by releasing complete source code and documentation.

Abstract

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.

Problem

• localization
• Flying Light Specks
• swarm-based
• miniature drones
• 3D shape formation

Innovation

• Swarical
• Flying Light Specks
• hierarchical localization
• swarm-based planning
• online localization