Hardware-in-the-loop simulators for multi-vehicles scenarios: survey on existing solutions and proposal of a new architecture

The aim of this paper is to review the available simulators defining in a first step the necessary requirements to cope with the multi-vehicles cooperation context. In order to get a complete overview of these tools, a new classification is proposed and is used to sort the existing simulators. It is worth to be noted that we focus our interest on simulators which can at least address the problem of marine robotics.