GazeboNS3: A Digital Twin System for UAV Swarms

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have advanced significantly, with multi-UAV systems offering advantages such as redundancy, cost-effectiveness, and less dependency on infrastructure. These systems can benefit applications like remote surveillance, search and rescue, and environmental monitoring. Ideally, UAVs should behave distributively and make their own decisions. However, developing these distributed algorithms for multi-UAV systems presents challenges, particularly in real-world testing, where hardware constraints, environmental dependencies, and limited analytics can hinder the development progress. Simulations have emerged as a key solution, allowing for rapid iteration and detailed analytics. Yet, current simulators often lack the capability to accurately model both the physical dynamics of UAVs and the complexity of their communication networks. This paper introduces GazeboNS31, a Digital Twin system designed to bridge this gap. Specifically, we combine the Gazebo physics simulator, the NS-3 network simulator, the Ardupilot's flight controller, and our empirical measurements of energy consumption and computation time on various commonly used onboard computers. Experiment results show that GazeboNS3 enables seamless emulation of UAVs' behavior and communication in realistic environments.