Recent advances in multi-rotor vehicle control and miniaturization of hardware, sensing, and battery technologies have enabled cheap, practical design of micro air vehicles for civilian and hobby applications. In parallel, several applications are being envisioned that bring together a swarm of multiple networked micro air vehicles to accomplish large tasks in coordination. However, it is still very challenging to deploy multiple micro air vehicles concurrently. To address this challenge, we have developed an open software/hardware platform called the University at Buffalo’s Airborne Networking and Communications Testbed (UB-ANC), and an associated emulation framework called the UB-ANC Emulator. In this paper, we present the UB-ANC Emulator, which combines multi-micro air vehicle planning and control with high-fidelity network simulation, enables practitioners to design micro air vehicle swarm applications in software and provides seamless transition to deployment on actual hardware. We demonstrate the UB-ANC Emulator’s accuracy against experimental data collected in two mission scenarios: a simple mission with three networked micro air vehicles and a sophisticated coverage path planning mission with a single micro air vehicle. To accurately reflect the performance of a micro air vehicle swarm where communication links are subject to interference and packet losses, and protocols at the data link, network, and transport layers affect network throughput, latency, and reliability, we integrate the open-source discrete-event network simulator ns-3 into the UB-ANC Emulator. We demonstrate through node-to-node and end-to-end measurements how the UB-ANC Emulator can be used to simulate multiple networked micro air vehicles with accurate modeling of mobility, control, wireless channel characteristics, and network protocols defined in ns-3.

中文翻译：

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使用 UB-ANC 模拟器模拟无人机群

多旋翼飞行器控制和硬件、传感和电池技术小型化的最新进展使微型飞行器的廉价、实用设计成为可能，用于民用和业余爱好应用。与此同时，正在设想多个应用程序，将多个联网的微型飞行器聚集在一起，以协同完成大型任务。然而，同时部署多个微型飞行器仍然非常具有挑战性。为了应对这一挑战，我们开发了一个名为布法罗大学机载网络和通信测试平台 (UB-ANC) 的开放式软件/硬件平台，以及一个名为 UB-ANC 仿真器的相关仿真框架。在本文中，我们介绍了 UB-ANC 仿真器，它将多微飞行器规划和控制与高保真网络仿真相结合，使从业者能够在软件中设计微型飞行器群应用程序，并提供无缝过渡到实际硬件上的部署。我们根据在两个任务场景中收集的实验数据证明了 UB-ANC 仿真器的准确性：具有三个联网微型飞行器的简单任务和具有单个微型飞行器的复杂覆盖路径规划任务。为了准确反映通信链路受到干扰和丢包的微型飞行器群的性能，以及数据链路、网络和传输层的协议影响网络吞吐量、延迟和可靠性，我们集成了开源离散-事件网络模拟器 ns-3 进入 UB-ANC 模拟器。