In a lab test, a quadruped robot’s moving camera cut a micro-drone’s median trajectory error from 11.0 centimeters to 6.9 centimeters. The 42-gram drone carried only an inertial measurement unit, so it relied on the quadruped to measure its position and orientation and send those estimates back.
The setup paired a Crazyflie 2.1+ micro-drone with Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped. A camera at the end of Spot’s seven-joint arm read four AprilTag visual markers on the drone. Spot combined that view with its own location to estimate the drone’s position and orientation in a shared map; the drone then fused the estimate with its inertial sensor to follow commanded waypoints.
Across eight flights on the same indoor path, median trajectory error against the commanded waypoints, measured with OptiTrack motion-capture cameras, was 11.0 centimeters with the quadruped stationary, 7.1 centimeters with only the arm tracking, and 6.9 centimeters with both arm and body moving. The active conditions kept the camera about 0.9 meters from the drone; the stationary test viewed it from about 2.7 meters. The researchers attribute the lower error to the closer view, which made the markers easier to measure. The paper reports eight flights across the three conditions but does not specify how many were run in each.
The work is a lab demonstration of cooperative localization and path tracking, not navigation through a real narrow opening. The study did not test route planning or operation outside the lab. Marker detections can drop during fast turns or occlusion, while accuracy falls at long or angled views; the drone’s battery lasted about seven minutes. The arXiv record labels this submitted version as before peer review and notes acceptance to the CLAWAR 2026 proceedings.
Sources
Original paper and experiments (arXiv:2610.06215v1)
arXiv record and conference status
Figure license: CC BY 4.0
Image: Alejandro Lorite Mora and Andrés Faíña, arXiv:2610.06215v1, CC BY 4.0.