We Built an Indoor Drone Light Show System in Nepal — And It Actually Works
GarudX successfully tested a 50-drone indoor micro swarm using Crazyflie platforms and our own custom swarm control interface with a Blender-like animation planner. Here's how we did it — and what it means for drone shows in Nepal.
Most people think drone light shows need thousands of metres of open sky and a million-dollar production budget. We wanted to prove that wrong.
Over the past year, GarudX's R&D team has been quietly building something we think is going to change how live events work in Nepal: a fully functional indoor micro drone swarm system — 50 Crazyflie nano-quadcopters, each weighing just 29 grams, choreographed with our own custom swarm control interface.
And in our most recent test, it actually worked.
Why Indoor Swarms Are Hard
GPS doesn't work indoors. That one sentence is the reason indoor drone shows are infinitely harder than outdoor ones. Outdoor swarms rely on centimetre-accurate RTK GPS to know exactly where every drone is at every moment. Take away GPS and you need an entirely different positioning system — one that is fast enough, accurate enough, and reliable enough to keep 50 flying objects from becoming 50 very fast projectiles.
We solved this with an indoor positioning system based on infrared lighthouse beacons — similar in concept to what high-end VR headsets use for room tracking. Base stations placed around the venue project invisible infrared sweeps across the space. Each Crazyflie drone detects these sweeps and calculates its own position onboard, in real time, with sub-10cm accuracy. No external computer needs to track every drone. They know where they are themselves.
The Part We're Most Proud Of: The Animation Planner
The swarm hardware is impressive. But the part our team is genuinely most proud of is the software we built to choreograph it.
Most commercial drone show software is opaque — you import waypoints, you set LED colours, you hope. We wanted something that felt more like creative tool than a flight management system. What we built is closer in spirit to Blender's animation timeline: a 3D viewport where you can place drones, scrub through time, set keyframes, assign LED patterns, and see the full performance play out in simulation before a single motor spins up.
The interface lets you design formations geometrically — draw a shape, the software distributes drones evenly across it — or manually position individual units for precise formations. Transitions between formations are automatically interpolated with smooth bezier curves, so the swarm moves fluidly rather than jumping between static poses.
Every animation is validated against collision-detection before export. If two drones are going to get too close at any point in the sequence, the system flags it and suggests a correction. Safety is built into the creative process, not bolted on afterwards.
The 50-Drone Test
Our initial test ran in a controlled indoor environment with 50 Crazyflie 2.1+ drones. We flew a three-minute sequence of formations — a rotating ring, a Nepali flag, a vertical helix, and a GarudX logo — all with synchronised RGB LED colour changes.
The results were better than we expected. Formation accuracy was consistently within 8cm. LED synchronisation was near-perfect. We had two drones drop out mid-sequence due to battery management issues (since resolved), but the system handled it gracefully — the remaining 48 redistributed automatically to maintain the planned formations.
What This Means for Events in Nepal
Outdoor drone shows have been inaccessible for most Nepali events because of cost, logistics, and aviation permissions. An indoor micro swarm changes the equation entirely. Corporate product launches, college events, cultural festivals, hotel openings, wedding receptions — any venue with a reasonable ceiling height becomes a candidate for a live drone light performance.
The system scales. We're currently testing at 50 drones. The architecture supports hundreds. And because each unit costs a fraction of a full-size show drone, the production economics are dramatically different.
This is still R&D. We're not selling packages yet. But we're getting close. If you're an event organiser or venue and you want to be among the first to explore what this could look like for your event, get in touch.
The sky — or in this case, the ceiling — is no longer the limit.
