A Swarm Simulator

Abstract

Cooperative teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have applications for a number of civil and military missions. The cooperative control of a group of UAVs is a complex problem that is dominated by uncertainty, limited information, and task constraints. Centralized, hierarchical and decentralized, decision and control algorithms have been developed to address this complexity. In order to investigate potential cooperative UAV control algorithms, a multi-vehicle simulator, called the cluster simulator was developed. The cluster simulator also has the flexibility to simulate other distributed logic systems such as power networks, land vehicles etc. though we are only just starting to investigate these applications.