Concepedia

Stonefish: An Advanced Open-Source Simulation Tool Designed for Marine Robotics, With a ROS Interface

OCEANS 2019 - Marseille · 2019 · 97 citations · 16 references

TL;DR

The marine robotics community lacks a high‑quality simulator for scientific research, especially for testing control and vision algorithms in realistic underwater intervention tasks, as existing solutions are outdated or combine disparate tools, leading to poor performance, instability, and missing features. This paper introduces a new software tool designed primarily for simulating intervention autonomous underwater vehicles (I‑AUV), though its applicability extends beyond that domain. The tool provides advanced geometry‑based hydrodynamics, realistic sensor and actuator simulation, and detailed underwater and surface rendering, implemented as a C++ library with a Robot Operating System (ROS) package.

Abstract

The marine robotics community is lacking a high quality simulator for doing scientific research, especially when it comes to testing control and vision algorithms in realistic underwater intervention tasks. All of the solutions used today are either outdated or try to combine different software tools, which often results in bad performance, stability issues and lack of important features. This paper presents a new software tool, focused on, but not limited to, simulation of intervention autonomous underwater vehicles (I-AUV). It delivers advanced hydrodynamics based on actual geometry, simulation of underwater sensors and actuators, as well as realistic rendering of underwater environment and ocean surface. It consists of a library written in C++ and a Robot Operating System (ROS) package.