Design And Implementation Of An Interactive UAV Swarm Simulation Platform

Recent research on unmanned vehicle indicates a trend on UAV intelligence and clustering.On account of a demand for massive plants and complicated task scenario,a simulation platform plays a more significant role than ever in the development of UAV swarm system.Based on an integrated simulation platform,the team is able to test and verify the prototypes of different level design,which speeds up project iteration and saves cost in both time and money.This article provides a model-based verification environment for swarm algorithm.The embedded code of swarm algorithms which are developed in Matlab and Simulink is first implemented.Then the embedded code is integrated in the host computer,which compose a simulation loop along with the UAV swarm fast prototype.Finally,based on the 3D visualization system and a gesture-voice-based interaction VR environment,man-in-the-loop experiments are designed and simulated.This article mainly focused on these parts:1.The research status of UAV swarm simulation at home and abroad is investigated,including the analysis of distributed simulation and VR interface.The platform architecture is then designed according to UAV swarm simulation requirement and modular design method.2.Basic software modules of host PC are designed and developed.Swarm algorithms which is previously designed in Simulink are integrated by digital simulating module.In real-time simulating module,a swarm prototype is implemented and is controlled by host computer based on xPC.Finally,the platform provides a customizable and easy-extended network frame for data transmission.3.Visual software modules are developed with Unity 3D.The virtual scene is built on a resource library including 3D models and a large-scale terrain resolution based on WorldMachine.An auto-layout and message-subscribed UI framework is implemented with UGUI.The platform also provides a VR swarm interface by HTC Vive and online speech recognization REST API.Finally,based on current modules,this article implements an experiment of a 10 UAV cluster collaborative task man-in-the-loop simulation.