A Framework for Visually Realistic Multi-robot Simulation in Natural Environment

Abstract

This paper presents a generalized framework for the simulation of multiple robots and drones in highly realistic models of natural environments. The proposed simulation architecture uses the Unreal Engine4 for generating both optical and depth sensor outputs from any position and orientation within the environment and provides several key domain specific simulation capabilities. Various components and functionalities of the system have been discussed in detail. The simulation engine also allows users to test and validate a wide range of computer vision algorithms involving different drone configurations under many types of environmental effects such as wind gusts. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the system by giving experimental results for a test scenario where one drone tracks the simulated motion of another in a complex natural environment.

Planning Domain Simulation: An Interactive System for Plan Visualisation

“…Simulators are also prevalent in robotics applications and multiple systems make use of game engines to provide virtual environments, such as MORSE (Echeverria et al 2011) or Drone Sim Lab (Ganoni and Mukundan 2017). Game engines also offer several benefits such as multiple rendering cameras, physics engines, realistic post-processing effects, and audio engines, without the need to implement these features from scratch (Ganoni and Mukundan 2017), making them desirable tools for simulation.…”

Simulated Forest Environment and Robot Control Framework for Integration with Cover Detection Algorithms

“…The capabilities of game engines have been utilized to the benefit of the computer vision community in order to construct frameworks that are applicable in scientific applications where testing and evaluation of vision-based algorithms for detection, tracking, and navigation could be accomplished more effectively with inputs from several kinds of sensors and conditions of the environment. Ganoni and Mukundan [5] introduced a generic framework for simulating a fleet of robots or drones operating in a synthetic model of the natural world. The suggested simulation architecture makes use of the Unreal Engine4 to generate optical and depth sensor outputs at any location and in any direction inside the simulation environment.…”

HIL Flight Simulator for VTOL-UAV Pilot Training Using X-Plane

“…This digitalization of the flight controller is usually called software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulation. Many UAV simulators follow this approach [20][21][22]. However, running the same code in a virtual environment does not guarantee the same exact performance as running it in the actual flight controller hardware.…”