Simulating many vehicles in SITL

ArduPlane Plane Simulation
1

I’m working on a project to simulate swarms of vehicles. Mixed copter and plane using SITL. I’ve found some related threads like this talking about a couple vehicles, but for this project I want to support N vehicles in simulation where N is greater than 20. I can scale across multiple machines to reach my goal number of vehicles, but would prefer to minimize the complexity by keeping the number of machines required as low as possible.

So does anyone know of another project along these lines? If so any pointers would be appreciated.

Does anyone know what the limiting factor might be for pushing N instances of ardupilot in SITL higher on a single computer?

2

Hi,

I also work on swarm, SITL don’t require much power, but using plenty of it will surley trigger performance problems since normal computer haven’t infinite material cpu.
Launching them without mavproxy should improve performance since you won’t use python !

3

If it is for osrf capture the flag, you could look at https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/4883

4

Yeah it is. I’ll make sure I’m testing with that patch.

My ongoing notes are here: https://github.com/osrf/uctf/tree/add_ardupilot/doc/ardupilot

5

I’m working on a project to simulate swarms of vehicles. Mixed copter and plane using SITL. I’ve found some related threads like this talking about a couple vehicles, but for this project I want to support N vehicles in simulation where N is greater than 20. I can scale across multiple machines to reach my goal
number of vehicles, but would prefer to minimize the complexity by keeping the number of machines required as low as possible.

So does anyone know of another project along these lines? If so any pointers would be appreciated.

Does anyone know what the limiting factor might be for pushing N instances of ardupilot in SITL higher on a single computer?

I was happily using dronekit-python for my avoidance testing: