CoUAV: a multi-UAV cooperative search path planning simulation environment

Sophisticated multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) simulation environments developed so far intrinsically paid significant attention to high-fidelity flight control system components to realistically account for low-level decision support. However, the use of these simulators often incurs a large overhead when focusing on cooperative high-level decision tasks, such as planning in mobile sensor networks. Therefore, a new discrete-event simulation environment, specially designed to investigate multi-agent search path planning coordination problems for surveillance and reconnaissance is proposed. Named CoUAV, the simulation capability gives the flexibility to define and customize simulation configurations from high-level abstract key components and stochastic events specifically aimed at exploring team coordination strategies for distributed information gathering. It abstracts away costly low-level system specifications. The environment provides the user with problem definition, visualization and post-simulation solution analysis capabilities. The versatility and flexibility of the environment is well-suited to explore the strengths and weaknesses of new and existing coordination strategies through comparative performance analysis over a variety of resource-bounded search path planning problem conditions. As an example, simulation results are presented for a military multi-UAV reconnaissance/target search mission comparing two solution designs.