# Designing UAV Swarm Experiments: A Simulator Selection and Experiment Design Process
## 1 Introduction  
UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) swarms refer to a collective group of UAVs that operate in a coordinated manner to achieve a common goal. UAV swarms are characterized by their ability to exhibit coordinated behaviors, where individual UAVs collaborate and interact with one another to accomplish tasks efficiently and effectively. This enables UAV swarms to perform complex operations for applications in surveillance [1, 2], agriculture [3], military [4], search and rescue missions [5], and environmental monitoring [6, 7]. The use of swarms offers several advantages over single UAVs, including increased robustness, redundancy, scalability, and enhanced mission capabilities. By leveraging swarm intelligence and advanced coordination algorithms, UAV swarms have the potential to revolutionize various industries and applications, opening up new possibilities for autonomous and collaborative aerial operations. Current swarm development can be broadly classified by their topology [8, 9], by type of swarm agents such as homogeneous [10] or heterogeneous [11], and by application-specific usage such as remote sensing [12]. Of course, more advanced swarm descriptions and classifications exist that are created with a specific development goal in mind. The environment that these swarms work in is prone to disruptions, which can impede their operation. With the degree of close-knit topology built into these swarms, damage orfailure of swarm agents can result in a compromise in mission progress [13]. Additionally, swarms have a multilayered architecture of various components working cohesively to bring about acceptable operation. The creation of resilient UAV swarms requires the integration of multiple components [14]. Researchers across the globe are creating novel methods for engineering resiliency in UAV swarms [15]. For safety and reliability, it is necessary to perform rigorous testing of swarm systems in all phases of development. A wide range of general robotic or UAV specific simulation platforms exists that may be explored for this. Choosing a suitable simulator is important, as different simulation environments offer different performance, model detail, and built-in features, all of which may affect the success and the merit of a simulation-based study. Despite numerous options to choose from, there is a lack of descriptive research that categorizes and indexes them for the convenience of future experiment designers. There are a multitude of tools available in the robotics development scenario, such that it is almost impossible to keep track of all of them without studies like this one to track and describe use-case scenarios. Each simulator tool and the platforms they are built on have their strengths and weaknesses, which the developer must be aware of before choosing a simulator. However recent trends in development have shifted focus in terms of the compatibility of these tools, such that a lot of these tools can be used in conjunction with each other. It is now entirely possible to connect integral as well as third-party plugins from different platforms to talk to each other for data sharing and system design. This leads to advantages such as distributing simulation tasks among various platforms. While this may not necessarily increase simulation performance, it opens up a wider array of capabilities and features during system design and control. The domain of mobile robot simulation, design, and development is a growing field along with its associated subcategories. The authors in [16] portray swarm robotics as a subclass of mobile robots. The objectives of this study are to present a descriptive case study of UAV swarm simulation tools that the authors have used to design experiments and validate results. However, not all simulation platforms were capable enough to support the expectations of all experiments. Hence, a variety of tools were needed to perform them. Sometimes interfacing the various tools for real-time and post-processed data exchange was also necessary.