# Designing UAV Swarm Experiments: A Simulator Selection and Experiment Design Process
## 1 Introduction
Additionally, this study highlights the experimental design process required to conduct both real-world and simulation tests of several UAV swarm experiments. While making progress on specific objectives in UAV swarm development that require the design of a variety of experiments, the authors have examined and used a range of simulators capable of expressing UAV swarms. The experiment designs were aimed at incorporating resiliency into UAV swarms. The three objectives for resilient UAV swarm development currently being worked on as part of building resilient UAV swarms by the authors are as follows:  
1. Creating inter-agent and global policies for path planning, swarm movement, and collision avoidance using techniques such as artificial potential fields and bioinspired pheromone maps. 2. Creating swarm agent-specific SAR (Search and Rescue) frameworks that focus on improving operational swarm resilience rather than external operations. 3. Examining the impacts to swarm dynamics and performance on the introduction of heterogeneous agents in the UAV swarm. This study describes a concise experiment design strategy executed while creating resilient swarm protocols for various UAV swarm scenarios. These experiments were planned and categorized in an experimental series each having unique objectives and outcomes. The major contributions of this research paper include a thorough examination of existing simulation platforms, aiding researchers in selecting the most suitable tool for their swarm experimentation needs. Additionally, the outlined experimental design process will provide a valuable framework to assist users in selecting the appropriate simulation tool for developing specific objectives for UAV swarms. Presently, surveys concerning simulation platforms offer general overviews of these platforms without delving into specific case scenarios. The designed experiment series herein are implemented for the choice of simulation platforms, and sample experimental results are shown. The novelty of this research lies in its systematic approach to designing experiments for UAV swarm systems. While the development of UAV swarm technology has gained traction due to its diverse applications, there has been a lack of standardized experimental procedures to validate and optimize the performance of these systems. This research bridges the gap by offering a well-defined and rigorous experimental design process, encompassing the selection of appropriate simulation platforms and the formulation of specific objectives. By addressing the need for robust experimental validation before deploying UAV swarms in dynamic environments, this study contributes to the advancement and resilience of swarm technology, paving the way for its successful integration in real-world applications. Researchers and practitioners can utilize the insights from this paper to conduct evidence-based evaluations, ensuring the reliability and efficiency of UAV swarm systems across various scenarios and challenges. Our findings are condensed in this brief article below and organized in the following manner. Section 2 outlines previous work on simulation platforms and lists reasons to re-examine them. Section 3 briefly defines swarm characteristics such as network topology, deployment strategies, and composition. Section 4 describes the experimental series and their targeted development objectives. Section 5 shows implementation scenarios of the selected simulation platforms for every experiment series. Section 6 outlines future work considerations and Section 7 has a concluding statement.