How-To Guides

Crazyswarm Integration with Git

In this tutorial we discuss ways to use the Crazyswarm in your own projects, while properly version-controlling you custom launch files and scripts.

Option 1: Fork

The most straight-forward approach is to fork the Crazyswarm repository. This fork can be included as a submodule in your own projects and your own launch files and scripts can be in ros_ws/src/crazyswarm along with the provided examples.

The only downside of this approach is that it becomes rather difficult to update with the latest version upstream, especially if you have changes in one of the submodules (like the firmware).

Option 2: Custom ROS Package

If you only have custom launch files, scripts, or firmware, you can simplify the process by creating a custom out-of-source ROS package:

any/folder$ catkin_create_pkg my-crazyswarm-pkg

In particular, you can create this package in any folder, including another git repository.

Then, add this package to your crazyswarm workspace by using a symbolic link:

crazyswarm/ros_ws/src/userPackages$ ln -s /path/to/my-crazyswarm-pkg .

In you package, you can have your own launch files, yaml configuration files, and scripts, similar to the folder structure in the crazyswarm package.

To run, you can use its optional arguments:

crazyswarm/ros_ws/crazyswarm/scripts$ python --configpath ../../userPackages/my-crazyswarm-pkg/launch/ --stm32Fw /path/to/cf2.bin

To run your own launch file, simply use:

$ roslaunch my-crazyswarm-pkg my-custom-launch-file.launch

To run your own scripts, you need to adjust the Python package search path so that our helper library is found:

my-crazyswarm-pkg/scripts$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/path/to/crazyswarm/ros_ws/src/crazyswarm/scripts

Creating a new streaming setpoint mode

In this tutorial, we walk through the steps of implementing a new streaming setpoint mode. This task is a good tutorial because it touches nearly all parts of the Crazyswarm system, including the onboard firmware.

High-level vs. streaming control modes

In a streaming setpoint mode, the PC sends Setpoint values over the radio many times per second to each robot individually. The onboard feedback controller tries to achieve the states specified by the setpoint.

In comparison, in a high-level control mode, the PC sends instructions like Piecewise Polynomial trajectory plans over the radio, and the onboard firmware uses the stored plan to compute a new control setpoint in every iteration of the main loop.

Streaming setpoint modes simplify the process of developing new high-level planners, since the planner can run on the PC where it has access to more computational resources. However, they require more radio bandwidth, so they do not scale as well to large numbers of robots. Currently, we have not validated anything larger than 7 robots on 3 radios.

High-level control modes require implementing more planning logic onboard in the firmware code. This can be a challenge due to the limited computational resources and the difficulty of implementing numerical algorithms in C as compared to C++ or Python. However, the effort pays off in lower radio bandwidth requirements and increased robustness to hiccups in the radio communication.

The choice of a particular high-level planning algorithm suggests a choice of which states to include in the control setpoint. For example, piecewise polynomials (of sufficiently high order and smoothness) have continuous high-order derivatives, which makes it possible to compute setpoints for the entire state, including acceleration and angular velocity. On the other hand, a graph-based planner or RRT might only give us a sequence of positions connected by straight lines, so it makes sense to only provide a position setpoint and let the onboard feedback controller decide whatever velocity, acceleration, attitude, and angular velocity it needs to track the position setpoint most accurately.

CRTP radio packet definition

First, we define our radio packet. Radio packets follow the CRTP (Crazyflie Real-Time Protocol) defined by Bitcraze: On that page we see the following diagram of the one-byte CRTP header:

   7    6    5    4    3    2    1    0
|       Port        |  Link   |  Chan.  |

The most important part is the 4-bit port value, which is used in the Crazyflie firmware to select between different subsystems for further processing of the packet. Streaming control setpoints use port 7. We define the radio protocol for our setpoint by defining C a struct in crazyflie_cpp/include/crazyflie_cpp/crtp.h:

struct crtpFullStateSetpointRequest
        float x, float y, float z,
        float vx, float vy, float vz,
        float ax, float ay, float az,
        float qx, float qy, float qz, float qw,
        float rollRate, float pitchRate, float yawRate);
  const crtp header;
  uint8_t type;
  int16_t x;
  int16_t y;
  int16_t z;
  int16_t vx;
  int16_t vy;
  int16_t vz;
  int16_t ax;
  int16_t ay;
  int16_t az;
  int32_t quat; // compressed quaternion, xyzw
  int16_t omegax;
  int16_t omegay;
  int16_t omegaz;
} __attribute__((packed));

After the CRTP header, we have another byte uint8_t type specifying the type of control setpoint. The canonical source of these values is enum packet_type in the Crazyflie firmware. In the remainder of the struct we have 29 bytes left for the setpoint value.

How we implement the binary protocol

To send a packet, we cast the struct to a raw byte array uint8_t *. The reciever casts the packet bytes back to a struct. This technique is not considered robust compared to parsing the byte stream; in fact, it only works at all due to the following facts:

  • The C and C++ languages both enforce that a struct’s members are laid out in memory in the same order in which they are declared in the source code.
  • The line __attribute((packed)) is a GCC extension. (This means it is not part of the ANSI C language specification, and C compilers are not required to implement it.) Its purpose is to disallow the compiler from performing struct padding. This means there will be no empty space in the struct’s memory layout. In other words, its sizeof is exactly the sum of the sizeof s of its members.
  • The x86 and ARM architectures are both little-endian by default, so types that are larger than 8 bits are decoded in the correct byte order.
  • We always use exact-width integer types provided by <stdint.h> instead of the more familiar types int, long, char, and so on. The latter types can vary in size on different platforms. For example, long is 4 bytes on 64-bit Windows systems but 8 bytes on 64-bit Linux systems.

From all this, one can show that the struct-casting method will produce correct results in our setup. The macro CHECKSIZE on the final line uses a static_assert to ensure at compile time that the struct is small enough to fit in a radio packet.

Note that our example has used 16-bit fixed-point numbers and advanced quaternion compression to fit a lot of values in one packet. Most setpoint types contain fewer values and fit in the packet without as much compression. All CRTP structs in crtp.h should have a constructor that accepts uncompressed types, so the calling code does not need to know about compression tricks or the exact byte layout. If there is nontrivial work to be done in the constructor, it can be placed in crazyflie_cpp/src/crtp.cpp, otherwise it should be defined inline in crtp.h. Our new constructor looks like:

  float x, float y, float z,
  float vx, float vy, float vz,
  float ax, float ay, float az,
  float qx, float qy, float qz, float qw,
  float rollRate, float pitchRate, float yawRate)
  : header(0x07, 0), type(6)
        float s = 1000.0;
        this->x = s * x;

First, we specify port 7 in the header byte (as discussed above) and the correct type value. In the constructor body, we convert floating-point values in meters to integer values in millimeters. (Most of the repetitive code is snipped here.)

crazyflie_cpp wrapper

Calling code never constructs crtp.h packets directly; instead, it interacts with the radio via the Crazyflie class defined in crazyflie_cpp/include/crazyflie_cpp/Crazyflie.h. We need to add a new method to the class Crazyflie:

void sendFullStateSetpoint(
  float x, float y, float z,
  float vx, float vy, float vz,
  float ax, float ay, float az,
  float qx, float qy, float qz, float qw,
  float rollRate, float pitchRate, float yawRate);

The implementation should go in crazyflie_cpp/src/Crazyflie.cpp and is very simple:

void Crazyflie::sendFullStateSetpoint(
        float x, float y, float z,
        float vx, float vy, float vz,
        float ax, float ay, float az,
        float qx, float qy, float qz, float qw,
        float rollRate, float pitchRate, float yawRate)
  crtpFullStateSetpointRequest request(
        x, y, z,
        vx, vy, vz,
        ax, ay, az,
        qx, qy, qz, qw,
        rollRate, pitchRate, yawRate);

Note that we are using the templated overload of Crazyflie::sendPacket that handles casting the struct pointer to uint8_t * automatically.

ROS service

Although crazyflie_cpp fully abstracts away the details of the binary protocol and the radio hardware, there are still a few reasons why it’s not desirable to call crazyflie_cpp functions directly from higher-level code.

First, the radio transmission functions block due the latency of the USB bus and of the radio communication itself. This makes sense within crazyflie_cpp, because there is no other work to do besides sending and recieving radio packets, and the radio can only be used by one thread at a time. However, in the higher-level code, there is no reason to block because control setpoints are a “fire and forget” data stream (like UDP) – the high-level code should not care whether or not every single control setpoint packet is transmitted successfully. There is other work to be done instead, such as computing the next setpoint. This implies that the radio functions should run, at minimum, in a separate thread.

Additionally, C++ is a good language for a radio protocol implementation, but it is a more difficult language than Python. A Python wrapper makes Crazyswarm more accessible to novice programmers.

Finally, if high-level code calls radio functions directly, it cannot run in a simulator. There needs to be an abstraction layer somewhere in the system.

In Crazyswarm, we address these issues by using ROS (Robot Operating System) to run the crazyflie_cpp functionality in a separate process. Despite its name, ROS is not an operating system. It is an application-level software framework focused on typed interprocess communication. An introduction to ROS is out of this tutorial’s scope; readers should refer to We assume the reader is familiar with ROS’s concepts of messages, nodes and topics, which are designed specifically for streaming “fire and forget” data.

Complex setpoint types may require defining a new ROS message type. It is always preferable to use standard types if an appropriate type exists. For the full quadrotor state, we define a new message in crazyswarm/msg/FullState.msg:

Header header
geometry_msgs/Pose pose
geometry_msgs/Twist twist
geometry_msgs/Vector3 acc

Notice how we used the Pose and Twist standard compound types instead of raw Vector3 for everything. This helps Crazyswarm’s compatibility with other robotics packages available in ROS, such as planners.

For performance reasons, Crazyswarm is implemented as one monolithic ROS node instead of several communicating nodes. This means we only need to modify one class, CrazyflieROS, to support our new setpoint. There are three main changes: adding a method to handle setpoint messages, adding a ros::Subscriber object to subscribe to those messages, and setting up the subscriber in the run() method. We show the basic idea here, abbreviating other methods and repetitive code with ...:

class CrazyflieROS
        void cmdFullStateSetpoint(
                const crazyswarm::FullState::ConstPtr& msg)
                if (!m_isEmergency) {
                        float x = msg->pose.position.x;
                        float yawRate = msg->twist.angular.z;

                        m_cf.sendFullStateSetpoint(x, ..., yawRate);

                        m_sentSetpoint = true;
        void run()
                ros::NodeHandle n;
                m_subscribeCmdFullState = n.subscribe(
                        m_tf_prefix + "/cmd_full_state",

        ros::Subscriber m_subscribeCmdFullState;

Note that our new method cmdFullStateSetpoint does little more than unpacking the ROS message and calling the appropriate method on m_cf, which is an instance of the crazyflie_cpp/Crazyflie class. We also check for emergency state. The flag m_sentSetpoint = true helps decide whether it is necessary to send a “heartbeat” ping packet to the Crazyflie.

In the run() method, we have chosen a name for the setpoint’s ROS topic, and we are initializing our ros::Subscriber object to connect that topic to the new method.

pycrazyswarm wrapper

Finally, we implement the ability to publish the FullState message in pycrazyswarm Python class. This is another thin wrapper, taking care of the ROS publisher object and converting numpy types into ROS types:

from crazyswarm.msg import ..., FullState

class Crazyflie:

        def __init__(...):
                self.cmdFullStatePublisher = rospy.Publisher(
                        prefix + "/cmd_full_state", FullState, queue_size=1)
                self.cmdFullStateMsg = FullState()
                self.cmdFullStateMsg.header.seq = 0
                self.cmdFullStateMsg.header.frame_id = "/world"


        def cmdFullState(self, pos, vel, acc, yaw, omega):
                self.cmdFullStateMsg.header.stamp =
                self.cmdFullStateMsg.header.seq += 1
                self.cmdFullStateMsg.pose.position.x    = pos[0]
                self.cmdFullStateMsg.twist.angular.z    = omega[2]

The Python class corresponding to the FullState message has been auto-generated by ROS’s build system catkin_make. We import it here.

In class Crazyflie’s constructor, we set up a ROS publisher object for our new topic. Note that we publish on the same topic that we subscribed to in the C++ CrazyflieROS node earlier. We also construct one FullState object and store it as a data member. This is an important performance optimization to avoid allocating and deallocating heap memory every time we publish a setpoint.

The new method cmdFullState(...) is the outer layer that pycrazyswarm scripts will use. We update the timestamp and sequence number on the message object we constructed earlier; copy the data from the arguments (either plain Python arrays or numpy arrays) into the ROS message object, and finally publish it. Note that the publish(...) call will return immediately rather than waiting for the packet to actually be sent on the radio.

Note: Why so many layers?

We have modified three layers on the PC side of things to add our new setpoint type: crazyflie_cpp, crazyswarm, and pycrazyswarm. We wrote a lot of boilerplate code to copy the same data from NumPy types, to ROS types, to C++ function arguments, and finally to a CRTP binary protocol struct. To understand what we gained with this layered approach, it is helpful to think about the main role of each layer:

  1. crazyflie_cpp is the only layer that needs to understand the radio protocol and how to control the Crazyradio via USB.
  2. crazyswarm handles all the concurrency. It performs the M:N multiplexing of multiple Crazyflies onto multiple Crazyradios, deals with resending and ACKs in reliable communiation modes (not discussed in this tutorial), communicates with the motion capture system, and so on.
  3. pycrazyswarm implements the shared abstraction of the real-hardware system and simulator. It is good to do this outside the ROS layer, because ROS is finicky about Linux distributions and versions. We can develop in the simulator on MacOS and other Linuxes.

It is also worth mentioning that crazyflie_cpp is a standalone project that can be used outside the Crazyswarm setting.

Firmware CRTP parsing

We are now finished with the PC part of our implementation. We turn our attention to the onboard firmware. As mentioned earlier, the first step is to define a packed struct for “parsing by casting” of the incoming raw bytes. This takes place entirely in crazyflie-firmware/src/modules/src/crtp_commander_generic.c:

struct fullStatePacket_s {
        int16_t x;         // position - mm
        int16_t y;
        int16_t z;
        int16_t vx;        // velocity - mm / sec
        int16_t vy;
        int16_t vz;
        int16_t ax;        // acceleration - mm / sec^2
        int16_t ay;
        int16_t az;
        int32_t quat;      // compressed quaternion, see quatcompress.h
        int16_t rateRoll;  // angular velocity - milliradians / sec
        int16_t ratePitch; //  (NOTE: limits to about 5 full circles per sec.
        int16_t rateYaw;   //   may not be enough for extremely aggressive flight.)
} __attribute__((packed));

We then write a decoder that unpacks the (possibly compressed) CRTP setpoint packet into the firmware’s setpoint_t struct. Critically, the setpoint_t struct contains members for all data that any setpoint mode might require, and “mode” tags that inform the feedback controller on how it should behave:

static void fullStateDecoder(setpoint_t *setpoint, uint8_t type, const void *data, size_t datalen)
        const struct fullStatePacket_s *values = data;

        ASSERT(datalen == sizeof(struct fullStatePacket_s));

        #define UNPACK(x) \
        setpoint->mode.x = modeAbs; \
        setpoint->position.x = values->x / 1000.0f; \
        setpoint->velocity.x = (values->v ## x) / 1000.0f; \
        setpoint->acceleration.x = (values->a ## x) / 1000.0f; \

        #undef UNPACK

        float const millirad2deg = 180.0f / ((float)M_PI * 1000.0f);
        setpoint->attitudeRate.roll = millirad2deg * values->rateRoll;
        setpoint->attitudeRate.pitch = millirad2deg * values->ratePitch;
        setpoint->attitudeRate.yaw = millirad2deg * values->rateYaw;

        quatdecompress(values->quat, (float *)&setpoint->attitudeQuaternion.q0);
        setpoint->mode.quat = modeAbs;
        setpoint->mode.roll = modeDisable;
        setpoint->mode.pitch = modeDisable;
        setpoint->mode.yaw = modeDisable;

The UNPACK macro is a questionable attempt to reduce the amount of boilerplate code. It may be removed in the future. (This function would be much simpler if the packet were not compressed.) Within UNPACK, setting setpoint->mode->x to modeAbs informs the controller that it should track the absolute position, not just velocity. The other modes (defined in crazyflie-firmware/src/modules/interface/stabilizer-types.h) are modeVelocity, for velocity tracking, and modeDisable, meaning the controller should ignore that state completely.

Next, we add our new setpoint to the packet_type enum and map this particular enum value to our decoder via an array of function pointers:

enum packet_type {
        fullStateType = 6,


const static packetDecoder_t packetDecoders[] = {
        [fullStateType]          = fullStateDecoder,

Note that the value 6 for this enum corresponds to the initialization of the uint8_t type member of crtpFullStateSetpointRequest in its constructor in crazyflie_cpp/.../crtp.h. It is the programmer’s job to ensure these match.

The function crtpCommanderGenericDecodeSetpoint parses the type byte and dispatches to the correct decoder. By construction, it does not need to be modified when we add a new setpoint type.

Onboard control

The needed changes in onboard feedback control may change depending on the semantics of the new setpoint. In the case of the full-state setpoint, it is intended to be used with the “Mellinger” controller (crazyflie-firmware/src/modules/src/controller_mellinger.c, named after the paper by Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar).

A notable snippet of the controller code is the following:

if (setpoint->mode.x == modeAbs) {
        target_thrust.x = g_vehicleMass * setpoint->acceleration.x                       + kp_xy * r_error.x + kd_xy * v_error.x + ki_xy * i_error_x;
        target_thrust.y = g_vehicleMass * setpoint->acceleration.y                       + kp_xy * r_error.y + kd_xy * v_error.y + ki_xy * i_error_y;
        target_thrust.z = g_vehicleMass * (setpoint->acceleration.z + GRAVITY_MAGNITUDE) + kp_z  * r_error.z + kd_z  * v_error.z + ki_z  * i_error_z;
} else {
        target_thrust.x = -sinf(radians(setpoint->attitude.pitch));
        target_thrust.y = -sinf(radians(setpoint->attitude.roll));
        // In case of a timeout, the commander tries to level, ie. x/y are disabled, but z will use the previous setting
        // In that case we ignore the last feedforward term for acceleration
        if (setpoint->mode.z == modeAbs) {
          target_thrust.z = g_vehicleMass * GRAVITY_MAGNITUDE + kp_z  * r_error.z + kd_z  * v_error.z + ki_z  * i_error_z;
        } else {
          target_thrust.z = 1;

The if statement checks the mode values in the setpoint to see if the setpoint has specified absolute position control or not. If so (the first branch), we compute a target thrust vector using a PID control law with the desired position and velocity from the setpoint. We also use the acceleration value from the setpoint as a feedforward term. If not, we construct a target thrust vector based on the roll and pitch setpoints.

This code does not seem to handle the case when setpoint->mode.x == modeVelocity. Presumably, the second branch is only meant to handle setpoint->mode.x == modeDisable. In general, the “compatibility matrix” between setpoint types and controller types (other controllers include controller_pid.c and controller_indi.c) is somewhat murky; this should be improved in future work.