HeROS: A simulation platform for heterogeneous robotic swarms

Abstract

This paper presents HeROS, which is a novel simulation platform for heterogeneous robotic swarms. Compared with some existing simulation platforms, our HeROS (Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms Simulation) platform is more efficient due to its special designed communication methods and framework. Besides, it's convenient for use since we provide many kinds of control functions with free API's. It also supports many external libraries, which can be used to develop different simulation tasks. Using our developed platform, a mission of target search and tracking is realized as a case study, where a UAV-UGV heterogeneous system consisting of a UAV and two UGVs is required to search for a ground target and then move close to it. The implementation of the task successfully shows the effectiveness and performance of the HeROS platform.