DAEJEON, Dec. 10 (Korea Bizwire) — The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said Thursday that it had developed a high-precision distributed drone simulator to enable safe research on drones in virtual space.

Existing simulators designed to test the motion of drones could not test many drones at the same time, while being limited to performing simple missions. In addition, they could not accurately reflect characteristics such as sensors and flight environments.

The newly-developed simulator, however, uses avatar drones that accurately reflect actual drone characteristics.

After setting environmental conditions such as virtual drones and obstacles, the simulator can test how drones avoid obstacles or interact with each other.

The ETRI succeeded in operating as many as 100 virtual drones simultaneously by connecting server-class computers and laptops.

It also successfully reproduced the physical phenomenon that occurs when virtual drones collaborate and transport heavy objects connected in a line.

The ETRI also verified obstacle avoidance technology with actual drones mounted with a deep autonomous neural network that was advanced through hundreds of thousands of repetitive learning processes in a simulation space.

Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)