An Actor-based Simulation for Studying Uav Coordination

The effectiveness of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is being increased to reduce the cost and risk of a mission [Doherty et al. 2000]. Since the advent of small sized but high performance UAVs, the use of a group of UAVs for performing a joint mission is of major interest. However, the development of a UAV is expensive, and a small error in automatic control results in a crash. Therefore, it is useful to develop and verify the coordination behavior of UAVs through software simulation prior to real testing. We describe how an actor-based simulation platform supports distributed simulators, and present three cooperation strategies: self-interested UAVs, sharing-based cooperation, and team-based coordination. Our experimental results show how communication among UAVs improves the overall performance of a collection of UAVs on a joint mission.