Simbeeotic: A simulator and testbed for micro-aerial vehicle swarm experiments

Abstract

Micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) swarms are an emerging class of mobile sensing systems. Simulation and staged deployment to prototype testbeds are useful in the early stages of large-scale system design, when hardware is unavailable or deployment at scale is impractical. To faithfully represent the problem domain, a MAV swarm simulator must be able to model the key aspects of the sys-tem: actuation, sensing, and communication. We present Simbee-otic, a simulation framework geared toward modeling swarms of MAVs. Simbeeotic enables algorithm development and rapid MAV prototyping through pure simulation and hardware-in-the-loop ex-perimentation. We demonstrate that Simbeeotic provides the appropriate level of fidelity to evaluate prototype systems while maintaining the ability to test at scale.