An open source tool for simulation and supervision of underwater intervention missions

Abstract

This paper presents UWSim: a new software tool for visualization and simulation of underwater robotic missions. The software visualizes an underwater virtual scenario that can be configured using standard modeling software. Controllable underwater vehicles, surface vessels and robotic manipulators, as well as simulated sensors, can be added to the scene and accessed externally through network interfaces. This allows to easily integrate the simulation and visualization tool with existing control architectures, thus allowing hardware-in-the-loop simulations (HIL). UWSim has been successfully used for simulating the logics of underwater intervention missions and for reproducing real missions from the captured logs. The software is offered as open source, thus filling a gap in the underwater robotics community, where commercial simulators oriented to ROV pilot training predominate.