A Gazebo-based simulator for Unmanned Surface Vehicles with realistic environmental disturbances like water currents, winds, and waves.
USV Simulator (usv_sim_lsa) is a robotics simulation environment built on Gazebo for testing Unmanned Surface Vehicle navigation and control. It focuses on simulating realistic environmental disturbances like water currents, winds, and waves to evaluate USV performance in disaster scenarios. The simulator integrates multiple physics packages to provide a comprehensive testbed for developing robust control strategies.
Robotics researchers and developers working on USV navigation, control systems, and disaster response applications. It is particularly useful for those needing to test algorithms under realistic environmental conditions.
Developers choose USV Simulator for its integration of high-fidelity environmental disturbances from tools like HEC-RAS and OpenFoam, which are uncommon in standard robotics simulators. Its preconfigured boat models and testing scenarios accelerate development and validation of USV control methods.
Unmanned Surface Vehicle simulation on Gazebo with water current and winds
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Integrates HEC-RAS for water currents and OpenFoam for wind simulations, providing high-fidelity disturbances crucial for disaster scenario testing, as detailed in the environmental sections.
Includes airboat, differential boat, rudder boat, and sailboat with subdivided hulls for accurate buoyancy, shown in the boat models image, enabling diverse USV testing.
Offers scripts for common maneuvers like navigation through buoys and collision avoidance, accelerating algorithm validation with real-world inspired tasks.
Uses subdivided hull parts affected by waves, enhancing realism compared to simplified models, as illustrated in the buoyance diagram from the README.
Requires integration with multiple physics packages (OpenFoam, HEC-RAS, UWsim), which the documentation admits can be challenging to install and configure, increasing barrier to entry.
Preconfigured scenarios are based on Diluvio's River in Brazil; adapting to other locations requires custom HEC-RAS or OpenFoam simulations, limiting out-of-the-box usability.
The use of CFD simulations for disturbances likely results in heavy computational loads, making it unsuitable for low-resource environments or real-time applications.