A platform for the design, simulation and development of quadcopter multi-agent systems

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining the attention of researchers around the world. Recently researchers apply the multi-agent paradigm to such domain taking advantage of its research in cognition, deliberation, and mainly coordination mechanisms. The aim of our research is to contribute to the multiple quadcopter simulation area introducing a platform for the design, simulation, and development of quadcopter MultiAgent Systems (MAS). Specifically for this paper, we minutely discuss the proposed architecture and present the implemented prototype focusing our experiments on the scalability and the resource usage of it. The results demonstrate that the centralised perspective limits the scalability mainly when the physical engine is being used; also, we identify that the method responsible for the 3D update is the platform's bottleneck. After this work different type of studies in social interaction of quadcopters will follow up as well as the improvement of the proposed architecture, for instance, using a multi-threading approach.