Software design of monitoring and flight simulation for UAV swarms based on OSGEarth

Abstract

Real-time monitoring of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms is critical for flight safety. In order to monitor the position and working condition of UAV intuitively, we propose three-dimensional (3D) monitoring software for UAV swarms based on OpenSceneGraph Earth. The software is built on 'platform + plug-ins' architecture. The flight scene is constructed via 3D visualisation. UAV nodes are updated and moved in the flight scene when data is received in real-time. Meanwhile, in order to decrease the cost and improve the work efficiency in the development and performance verification of UAV swarms, simulation platforms for UAV swarms are designed. The swarm behaviour algorithms are pre-designed in a Python file, which will be read to parse the position data and display the flight scene. The software has been successfully applied to monitor the flight of UAV swarms. Excellent accuracy and reliability are demonstrated.