Semi-Physical Modeling of Drone Swarm Control Processes

The growing adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in military, search-and-rescue, agriculture, and other fields demands improved methods for drone swarm control. Controlling a drone swarm poses new challenges in ensuring flight stability, coordination, and safety. To justify the choice of simulation environment some popular drone swarm simulation tools (Gazebo, MATLAB/Simulink, CoppeliaSim, Webots) were analyzed with compare their capabilities. This paper describes approach to test drone swarm control algorithms that combine Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) and Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation with Gazebo environment. The proposed simulation architecture joins a real Pixhawk autopilot with running Ardupilot firmware (on HIL side) and Ardupilot plugins of virtual drones (on SIL side) to model drone swarm behavior in real time. Gazebo integrates the control loops of real and virtual drones via the MAVLink protocol and ROS-infrastructure. The simulation results of drone dynamic with obstacles for basic four drones swarm are presented. These results demonstrate effectiveness of proposed approach in Semi-Physical Modeling and indicate its potential to handle more complex drones swarm behavior.