A Gazebo/ROS-based Communication-Realistic Simulator for Networked sUAS

Although communication is a critical factor of situational awareness and performance on networked sUAS, most simulators do not provide realistic wireless communication modules. It prevents realizing communication among multiple UA and information sharing, which yields significantly different results compared with actual results in the real world. This paper presents a communication-realistic simulator to improve more realistic results from coordination or cooperative planning/control of networked sUAS. The simulator in this paper is based on Gazebo/ROS with ArduPilot, where ArduPilot-Socket-API (APS) which generates aircraft data to be usable in ROS from ArduPilot is implemented. The wireless transceiver plugin in Gazebo is used to mimic the wireless communication between two UA with aids of the Hata-Okumura model for wireless radio propagation and quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) for data package modulation. Simulation results describe how realistic communication in the presented simulator affects data delivery concerning different communication-related parameters. This paper also gives how well the presented simulator emulates communication status realistically by comparing it with communication data gathered in real flight tests.