UB-ANC emulator: An emulation framework for multi-agent drone networks

Recent interest in hobby aerial vehicles and their applications has seen the emergence of quadrotor designs with various form factors, and development of waypoint-based flight controllers such as APM and Pixhawk. Common to these flight controllers is the use of the Micro Air Vehicle Communications Protocol (MAVLink) that allows the flight controller to communicate with a ground control station. However, it is still challenging to experiment with multiple such aerial vehicles concurrently. To this end, we have developed an open software/hardware platform-the University at Buffalo's Airborne Networking and Communications testbed (UB-ANC)-that facilitates rapid development and deployment of multi-drone applications. In this paper, we present the UB-ANC Emulator, an emulation environment to design, implement, and test various applications (missions) involving one or more drones in software, and provides seamless transition to experimentation. We validate the UB-ANC Emulator's output against experimental data collected in a mission with three networked drones to demonstrate its feasibility and accuracy, and we demonstrate its scalability up to 100 drones using a simulated 'leader-follower' mission.