3D simulation of unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper describes the software architecture of a multi-agent simulator specifically designed to simulate Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The simulator has the aim of helping a developer to design a multi-agent application in which a team or flock of UAVs are employed for a certain mission in an environment. The basic feature of the described tool is the ability to simulate the real physics and dynamics of the entities involved (UAVs), not only by emulating real reactions to forces and torques but also showing the UAVs in a 3D view. The simulator provides the basic classes handling stabilization and control of a quadrotor UAV and let the developer to design her/his application by concentrating only on behavioral aspects of the entities. As usual in multi-agent applications, in order to handle interactions among UAVs, a set of classes is included to simulate a wireless communication system with a certain latency and packet loss probability. The simulator can be also executed without the visualization engine in order to run simulations (that could require a long time to complete) in headless servers. The paper also includes a case-study of a flocking application.