The Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC) is a multi vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi agent control on a real-world platform. In order to make such a testbed easy to use, the Stanford team focused on a small and light, low cost design, which presented numerous opportunities for innovative work. STARMAC consists of up to eight quadrotor vehicles that autonomously track a given waypoint trajectory. On board components include: Robostix for inner loop control from Gumstix, Stargate SBC from Crossbow (based on the Intel Xscale PXA255 microprocessor) with a Netgear MA701 Compact Flash Wifi card, PC104 for high level planning and automation, a Superstar II Differential GPS receiver from Novatel (Outputs 10 Hz Carrier phase measurement data), a 3DM-GX1 Inertial Measurement Unit from MicroStrain, a Sonic Rangefinder from Acroname, and caps, resistors, voltage regulators from Digikey.
