Operating hundreds of cooperative drones in contested RF environments requires resilience against Byzantine sensor failures and adversarial jamming. This paper validates a lightweight asynchronous consensus protocol running on low-power onboard ARM processors.
By verifying that spatial trajectory updates obey rigid aerodynamic limits and cross-checked multi-lateration beacons, rogue nodes are detected and excluded from the flight control graph in less than 35 milliseconds.
Injecting artificial 50-meter GPS step-errors into 16 random drones during high-speed formation flight produced zero collisions, with the swarm adapting geometry within 1.2 seconds.