Virtual sensor services for simulated mobile nodes

The faithful and flexible simulation of mobile robotic platforms with different application-specific sensing capabilities will become increasingly important in order to test a wide range of scenarios without having to run real missions. Current research focuses primarily on the mobility dynamics of such systems, and to this end a lot of work has already been done to support the simulation of various land, surface, underwater and aerial vehicles. We tackle a complementary aspect, namely that of sensing. More concretely, we propose to support virtual sensors via a service-oriented architecture, which cleanly separates a simulated vehicle from the logic that provides the (artificial) sensor values to it. The application running on the simulated vehicle has the illusion of accessing a real onboard sensor, but sensor data is provided by an independent software component, which can be flexibly placed on the same machine that runs the simulated vehicle, or on a remote host. This paper introduces the concept, describes a proof-of-concept implementation, and provides an evaluation that identifies the limits of the proposed approach.