Abstract
If using a vehicle presents a demonstrated interest, the use of multiple robots potentially heterogeneous should improve the samples quality and the velocity with which they are acquired. The deployment of multi-sensor platforms makes the use of a flotilla coordinate control strategy necessary. The positioning and communicating difficulties immediately make the task fussy. Therefore, it is no more conceivable to deploy a flotilla without having first tested the feasibility of the mission, the logical and temporal behavior of the robot's controller, the employed algorithms' effectiveness and the functioning of all subsystems. This is especially true when the vehicles are heterogeneous, come from different organizations or institutions and are assembled aiming the fulfillment of a common mission.<br />The complexity of control architectures on the one hand and the difficulties raised by the choice of control strategies for multi-vehicle scenarios in the other hand, require the creation of new simulation tools in order to test and validate control laws and control architecture while detecting preliminary inconsistencies within the scenarios. The purpose of this thesis is the study of a collaborative simulation tool called Thetis.<br />This is a simulator uppermost designed to address issues related to the context of robots cooperation. It is able to cope with heterogeneous multi-vehicle scenarios within the robots can communicate with each other taking into account the propagation constraints (interferences, bandwidth, attenuation...) and the natural behavior of used communication devices (wake up time, conflict between reception/emission...). The architecture of this simulator is open to facilitate the integration and dissemination for all of the modeling work while promoting reusability and modularity of these models. The capacity of the proposed system to deal with Hardware-in-The-Loop simulations allows to test and to validate the logical and temporal behavior of the controllers. This simulator is also distributed on several calculating units linked on a dedicated network, to be able to extend dynamically the computing power. This feature is required to increasing the number of vehicles and / or the complexity of the models while respecting real-time constraint and temporal decoupling between the controller and the simulator.<br />Thetis is currently one of the few available tools able to cope with the constraints related to the context of marine robots in flotilla. Preliminary tests involving one AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) Taipan (developed at LIRMM in France) and one USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle) Charlie (developed at ISSIA in Italy) on which are implemented two different control architectures are presented, while demonstrating the feasibility and validity of our approach.