The Crazyflie is Bitcraze’s palm-sized, open-source quadrotor — 9 cm motor-to-motor, about 27 grams fully assembled, designed from the start to be hacked, extended, and flown in swarms rather than sealed up like a consumer toy. It’s become one of the most common platforms in academic robotics labs for exactly that reason: cheap enough to crash without worry, open enough (hardware, firmware, and simulation alike) to modify down to the PCB.
The mechanism
Four propellers, each on its own continuous joint driven by its own motor — the standard
quadrotor layout, with no mimic joints or shared actuation. base_footprint, the URDF’s
root link, is a massless dummy frame joined to the real body (base_link) by a fixed
joint, a common ROS convention for giving a mobile robot a clean ground-reference frame
separate from its physical center of mass.
About this file — read before importing
This links directly to
crazyflie-simulation, Bitcraze’s own
official repository, unmodified. Unlike most third-party robots in this gallery, Bitcraze
publishes the description as a .xacro file rather than a literal .urdf — ARMOR expands
the macros itself after downloading, so Open in ARMOR gives you a working robot; nothing
here is a pre-baked derivative of Bitcraze’s files.