The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and the Open Robotics team at Intrinsic are happy to announce the initial release of the (new) Gazebo simulation for the MBARI Wave Energy Converter (WEC).
The platform of the simulation is ROS 2 Humble and Gazebo Garden.
As far as we are aware, this simulator offers the most accurate surface wave hydrodynamics currently existing in Gazebo and many other simulators. We have quantitatively evaluated the results against real-world data and the predecessor WEC simulation in Simulink.
We are looking for pilot users. In the near term, we are developing for the main target audience of controls researchers developing algorithms for wave energy buoys. However, we believe the physics and features developed are useful for other marine roboticists in general.
Notable features:
- Added-mass, a new SDF feature developed for this project and contributed upstream and released in sdformat
- Wave-body interaction from WAMIT data
- Mooring force
- Numerically evaluated against real-world experiments and an existing WEC simulation in Simulink
- Tested at 400 times faster than real time without losing accuracy
Welcome message
Entrypoint GitHub repository
Documentation and tutorials
DockerHub image to quickly try out the simulator (NVIDIA needed for this image. Non-NVIDIA image can be built from Dockerfile available in GitHub repository above.)
Release notes for each repository:
mbari_wec
mbari_wec_gz
mbari_wec_utils
We welcome pilot users and feedback.