This assumes the existing radio links can handle the extra bandwidth. I don't see a WiFi card, so they may use radios with low-baud serial connections. Maybe the radios are good enough that doubling the radio communications is fine. Now, all the new hardware means extra draw (and potentially extra batteries) on each quadrotor. They might fly with this extra weight, but it won't be nearly as long.
Also, indoor flying means no GPS. In this case, using accelerometers means something is dead-reckoning the position of each quadrotor. There's no more space/power for processing juice, so the external system must do this. Now the external system must take this localized data from each quadrotor and place it in some global coordinate system (how does it do that?). It will use dead-reckoning to determine the position of each quadrotor. This means the system is accumulating errors over time, for each quadrotor. At least sailors could eventually correct their position with stars - there is no real global correction with these sensors. They could hypothetically do radio range estimation on the radio signals of the quadrotors, but who knows what kind of accuracy they will get.
Correct. However, indoor positioning tech will likely come of age in the next 12-18 months driven by indoor mapping and navigation. Once that becomes commoditized, it'll make positioning a little aircraft like this in the x,y plane of a floorplan doable without dead-reckoning. From there, you could probably do some crude lidar to measure the distances above/below the craft to the ceiling/floor.
This assumes the existing radio links can handle the extra bandwidth. I don't see a WiFi card, so they may use radios with low-baud serial connections. Maybe the radios are good enough that doubling the radio communications is fine. Now, all the new hardware means extra draw (and potentially extra batteries) on each quadrotor. They might fly with this extra weight, but it won't be nearly as long.
Also, indoor flying means no GPS. In this case, using accelerometers means something is dead-reckoning the position of each quadrotor. There's no more space/power for processing juice, so the external system must do this. Now the external system must take this localized data from each quadrotor and place it in some global coordinate system (how does it do that?). It will use dead-reckoning to determine the position of each quadrotor. This means the system is accumulating errors over time, for each quadrotor. At least sailors could eventually correct their position with stars - there is no real global correction with these sensors. They could hypothetically do radio range estimation on the radio signals of the quadrotors, but who knows what kind of accuracy they will get.
Now I remember why I left robotics :-)