Sensors simulation environment for sensor data fusion

There are efforts in the wide field of applications today to fuse heterogeneous data from sensors in order to provide outputs, which are more informative than the original data from particular sensors. Reliable data are essential to be able to fuse sensor data in sensor fusion system. Nevertheless, it is in some cases difficult or even impossible to build a real environment complete with deployed sensors in order to ensure reliable data for the research, development and testing of sensor data fusion systems. Implementation of a sensors simulation environment, which would generate synthetic sensor data (numerical and non-numerical) is a solution to fulfill such efforts. This article describes a proposal of open source technologies, components, interfaces and architecture of a sensors simulation environment, which is able to generate synthetic sensors data according to user-defined scenarios. The defined and described architecture allows standardized interconnection of sensor simulators with fusion systems within a communication net.