AeroLoop is a winner project of the 1st Open Call of the RAWFIE (Road-, Air-, and Water- based Future Internet Experimentation) project which is funded by the European Commission (Horizon H2020 programme) under the Future Internet Research Experimentation (FIRE+) initiative.
The project has three main objectives:
1. To develop a simulation environment, which will allow users to test different mission plans/scenarios and application-level mission control software using virtual UAVs (vUAVs) in a flexible, controlled, safe and efficient way, before performing live tests in the field.
2. To integrate this simulation environment with the RAWFIE infrastructure.
3. To provide support for the simulation environment during the lifetime of the RAWFIE project.
Real-world experimentation with autonomous vehicles has significant overhead and can be quite costly in terms of person hours, while in case of failures, vehicles are subject to severe damage which may require costly repairs. The issue of safety only makes things harder as tests have to get approval from civil or even military authorities, and extra care must be taken to ensure that vehicles will not run out of control due to software bugs or hardware malfunction. AeroLoop aims to overcome all of these problems, during the early stages of development, by providing a simulation environment that enables repetitive, controlled, cheap and perfectly safe testing with multiple communicating autonomous aerial vehicles.