Mixed reality simulation for incremental development of multi-UAV systems

Development of complex multi-robot systems requires time-consuming and expensive testing and, especially in a case of unmanned aerial systems, it aggregates risk of hardware failures and legal issues when operating more than one unmanned aircraft simultaneously. It is highly favorable to deal with most of the eventual design flaws and system bugs before the final field tests in a simulation where the risks are significantly lower. On the other hand, the fidelity of the simulation needs to rise as the system development approaches the final stages and since some phenomena are difficult to be modeled precisely, a partial embodiment of the simulation in the physical world is necessary. In this paper, we present our results in the utilization of mixed reality simulation for incremental development of multi-UAV systems. We present three use cases where this method was used for development of various systems to show its versatility: (i) an unmanned system consisting of heterogeneous team of autonomous unmanned aircraft; (ii) a system for verification of collision avoidance methods among fixed wing UAVs; and (iii) a system for planning collision-free paths for light-sport aircraft.