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ADR-0001: No swarm-wide orchestrator; coordinate through data

Status

Accepted (2026-07-08)

Context

The fleet flies fully autonomously with no internet uplink and only intermittent mesh connectivity between drones. A conventional control plane (Kubernetes across the swarm, a leader election, a central scheduler) assumes stable membership and low-latency links — exactly what a swarm does not have. Partitions are the normal case, not the exception.

Options

Option Pros Cons
A — Cluster orchestrator spanning the swarm Familiar tooling Assumes stable membership; a partition stalls coordination; single point of failure in the air
B — Each drone autonomous, coordinating through exchanged data Survives partitions; no air-side control plane to fail No global view; behavior must be derivable from local state

Decision

Every drone is an autonomous node. There is no orchestrator spanning the swarm. Coordination happens by exchanging derived state (see ADR-0003), and each drone makes its own in-flight decisions against its local data window. Orchestration tooling (Kubernetes, Flux) is confined to the ground segment (ADR-0006).

Consequences

  • The platform degrades gracefully under partition: a drone that loses peers keeps flying and recording.
  • There is no single "fleet state" to query in the air; health questions are answered from each drone's own store and reconciled on the ground.
  • Design principle 1 in ../../README.md and the on-board model in ../02-architecture.md follow from this.