Multi-Drone Setup

DroneOS supports multiple drones through namespaced ROS 2 topics and services. Each drone gets its own drone_core instance with a unique name and MAVLink system ID.

SITL Setup

Start separate PX4 instances for each drone:

Drone 1 (default instance):

HEADLESS=1 make px4_sitl gz_x500

Drone 2 (instance 1):

HEADLESS=1 PX4_SYS_AUTOSTART=4001 PX4_GZ_MODEL_POSE="0,1" \
PX4_SIM_MODEL=gz_x500 MAV_SYS_ID=2 ./build/px4_sitl_default/bin/px4 -i 1

Each instance uses a different namespace (/fmu/ for drone1, /px4_1/fmu/ for drone2).

Running Multiple drone_core Nodes

In a single Docker container (for SITL):

ros2 run drone_core drone_core --ros-args \
    -r __node:=drone2 \
    -p drone_name:=drone2 \
    -p px4_namespace:=/px4_1/fmu/ \
    -p mav_sys_id:=2

For production (real hardware), each drone runs its own companion computer with dedicated containers.

Controlling Multiple Drones

# Fleet overview
droneos --fleet-status

# Target specific drones
droneos --drone drone1 --get-state
droneos --drone drone2 --arm

The GCS CLI supports switching targets with the target command:

Drone Agent> target drone2