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Recent advances in multi-rotor vehicle control and miniaturization of hardware, sensing, and battery technologies have enabled cheap, practical design of micro air vehicles for civilian and hobby applications. In parallel, several applications are being envisioned that bring together a swarm of multiple networked micro air vehicles to accomplish large tasks in coordination. However, it is still very challenging to deploy multiple micro air vehicles concurrently. To address this challenge, we have developed an open software/hardware platform called the University at Buffalo’s Airborne Networking and Communications Testbed (UB-ANC), and an associated emulation framework called the UB-ANC Emulator. In this paper, we present the UB-ANC Emulator, which combines multi-micro air vehicle planning and control with high-fidelity network simulation, enables practitioners to design micro air vehicle swarm applications in software and provides seamless transition to deployment on actual hardware. We demonstrate the UB-ANC Emulator’s accuracy against experimental data collected in two mission scenarios: a simple mission with three networked micro air vehicles and a sophisticated coverage path planning mission with a single micro air vehicle. To accurately reflect the performance of a micro air vehicle swarm where communication links are subject to interference and packet losses, and protocols at the data link, network, and transport layers affect network throughput, latency, and reliability, we integrate the open-source discrete-event network simulator ns-3 into the UB-ANC Emulator. We demonstrate through node-to-node and end-to-end measurements how the UB-ANC Emulator can be used to simulate multiple networked micro air vehicles with accurate modeling of mobility, control, wireless channel characteristics, and network protocols defined in ns-3.
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Software-Defined Radar Testbed for Multi-Target Tracking
Modern-day radar is used extensively in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, air traffic control, and maritime operations. The commonality between the aforementioned examples is the underlying tracking filter used to process ambiguous detections and track multiple targets. In this paper, we present a Software-Defined Radio-based radar testbed that leverages controllable and repeatable large-scale wireless channel emulation to evaluate diverse radar applications experimentally without the complexity and expense of field testing. Through over-the-air (OTA) and emulated evaluation, we demonstrate the capa-bilities of this testbed to perform multiple-target tracking (MTT) via Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) filtering. This testbed features the use of flexible sub-6 GHz or mmWave operation, electromagnetic ray tracing for site-specific emulation, and software reconfigurable radar waveforms and processing. Although the testbed is designed generalizable, for this paper we demonstrate its capabilities using an advanced driver-assistance system radar application.
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- PAR ID:
- 10355557
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE Radar Conference (RadarConf22)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/RadarConf2248738.2022.9764220
