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    "story_id": "mp-2026-09-11-012",
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    "headline": "Six Open Drones Avoided One Another at Speed",
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    "dek": "SwarmNxt combines assembly guidance, parallel deployment tools and onboard ROS 2 autonomy for physical swarm experiments.",
    "summary": "SwarmNxt combines assembly guidance, parallel deployment tools and onboard ROS 2 autonomy for physical swarm experiments.",
    "body_text": "SwarmNxt is an open software platform built around open OmniNxt drone hardware, with assembly instructions, swarm-wide update tooling and a ROS 2 stack for navigation. In one indoor experiment, six drones planned independently while avoiding high-speed inter-drone collisions; in another, four drones used onboard depth estimation to fly collectively through obstacles. Perception, planning and control ran onboard, while global position came from external motion capture. That dependence narrows the claim, but the release lowers the engineering barrier to reproducible physical swarm research.",
    "why_it_matters": "SwarmNxt combines assembly guidance, parallel deployment tools and onboard ROS 2 autonomy for physical swarm experiments.",
    "limitations": [],
    "importance": 8,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-11T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-09-11T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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    "tags": [
      "drone swarms",
      "open hardware",
      "ROS 2"
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    "corrections": []
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-09-11-012",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.11382",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-09-10T07:17:20.000-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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    "title": "Six Open Drones Avoided One Another at Speed",
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