Towards Design of an Autonomous Navigation Framework for Unmanned Surface Vessels using Marine Robotics Unity Simulator

Abstract

The rising importance of Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) in diverse maritime contexts, such as coastal monitoring and oceanographic applications, underscores the necessity for a robust simulation environment framework. This need arises from the limited availability of sea trials and demands a high-quality simulation setup to test USV autonomy across multiple scenarios with enhanced visual fidelity. This paper describes an autonomous navigation framework for USV in a Marine Robotics Unity Simulator (MARUS), a high-fidelity simulation environment based on Unity3D to close the gap. Our approach works on coupling the MARUS simulator offering water physics and a wide array of sensors commonly used in the maritime domain with a Robot Operating System (ROS) to facilitate remotely controlled USV behaviour and motion for different navigation scenarios to assess the vessel's maneuverability and overall performance characteristics.