Agile and tightly cooperating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in demanding real world environments with a high density of obstacles (such as forests) will be presented. Deploying teams of flying robots without external localization such as GNSS and motion capture systems brings numerous challenges especially if the UAV perception must be done at high speeds and close to the terrain. Some achievements of the research of fully autonomous aerial teams relying on onboard artificial intelligence will be presente d. The important research questions of whether the UAV groups can adapt better to localization failure than a single robot and how cooperative aerial vehicles can achieve high agility in high obstacle density areas will be discussed.
In addition to the fun damental swarming research, real applications of multi robot systems such as indoor documentation of large historical objects (cathedrals) by formations of cooperating UAVs, a cooperative inspection of underground mines inspired by the DARPA SubT competiti on, localization and interception of unauthorized drones, aerial firefighting, radiation sources localization, power line inspection, and marine teams of cooperating heterogeneous robots will be briefly introduced.