Underwater simulator for robotics applications in high depths

Abstract

Simulators are essential tools, mainly used before practical application projects, in various areas of engineering. The high development cost and complexity are just some of the factors that justify the development of simulators for a given project, which allows among other benefits, conduct tests of the agent behavior against an environment. In robotics, simulators have been used for a long time and consist an important stage in prototyping phases. When the focus is on high depths underwater robotics, simulators have even greater importance since the great difficulty of building robots for this kind of environment. This paper presents a simulator built with Blender IDE integrated with Robotic Operating System (ROS) for underwater robotics applications, using sensory data from a simulated physics game engine. We present results of applications using this project as well as discussion of the key benefits of its development. It is observed an important potential for projects in underwater robotics, and its appeal in demonstrations and examples for learning robotics and 3D modeling.