  A swarm of quadcopters can perform cooperative tasks, such as monitoring of a
large area, more efficiently than a single one. However, to be able to
successfully work together, the quadcopters must be aware of the position of
the other swarm members, especially to avoid collisions. A quadcopter can share
its own position by transmitting it via radio waves and in order to allow
multiple quadcopters to communicate effectively, a decentralized channel access
protocol is essential. We propose a new dynamic channel access protocol, called
Dynamic time slot allocation (DTSA), where the quadcopters share the total
channel access time in a non-periodic and decentralized manner. Quadcopters
with higher communication demands occupy more time slots than less active ones.
Our dynamic approach allows the agents to adapt to changing swarm situations
and therefore to act efficiently, as compared to the state-of-the-art periodic
channel access protocol, time division multiple access (TDMA). Along with
simulations, we also do experiments using real Crazyflie quadcopters to show
the improved performance of DTSA as compared to TDMA.
