Flexible Drones: ROS 2 Action-Based Coordination of Multiple Heterogeneous Drones

This paper presents flexible_drones, an open source framework for multiple drone coordination using Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 action-based interfaces. The proposed approach introduces a modular orchestrator architecture that provides structured feedback, which can be dynamically acted upon during execution. This framework addresses the limitations of traditional command-and-response drone control interfaces, provides greater insight into task progress, and enables behavior response to runtime feedback. Building on current tools for Crazyflie nanocopters, such as CFLib and Crazyswarm2, flexible_drones generalizes coordination to support heterogeneous aerial platforms. This paper demonstrates high-level coordination in simulation and real-world Crazyflie nanocopters, and discusses ongoing work extending the results to additional UAV platforms.