Design and development of simulator software for formation flight of drones

The technological advancements in flight technology has spearheaded research in design and development of drones. Drones have also gained popularity among consumers and is being employed for various consumer applications such as photography, videography, formation flights, delivery of items, surveillance etc. In this paper, design and development of a graphical user interface (GUI) based simulator to configure a swarm of drones for pattern formation in the sky is proposed. The proposed GUI allows users to draw a pattern of their choice on a grid based drawing window and the swarm of drones will form the pattern drawn. The proposed software simulator for formation flights is designed using ROS framework and Gazebo simulator. The proposed work can be easily employed for various military and non-military applications including consumer applications.