Simulation-supported development for cooperative Multi-UAV Systems with the Mysterio framework

Abstract

Over the years, UAVs (also known as drones) have been growing in studies and applications to solve diverse problems. Due to the complexity of these problems, dealing with just one UAV may not be enough, but using several UAVs together to work cooperatively increases its capacities, thus boosting innovative solutions. However, developing cooperative Multi-UAV systems is not trivial, and reuse support is usually limited to low-level implementation. This work presents a framework for Multi-UAVs, called Mysterio, which provides an underlying software architecture with essential Multi-UAV components, enabling the reuse of design and code so that engineers can instantiate it to carry out specific missions by making UAVs work in cooperation. We also present four instances of the framework to evaluate Mysterio’s effectiveness in different scenarios. Finally, we discuss the framework’s potential to provide and support design and code reuse to develop Cooperative Multi-UAVs systems for different application scenarios. The results showed the potential to develop multi-UAV systems using the proposed framework. Additionally, we extend our previous work bringing conceptual evolution and advances in the architecture and the framework. Finally, this evolution extends the framework API to support computer simulations of UAV systems based on the OMNeT++ simulator. This API is suitable for Single-UAV and Multi-UAV systems and has already been adapted to communicate with base stations implemented through the Mysterio Framework.