Maritime Community Group Meeting Feb 2025: Mecatron UnitySim for underwater robotics

Maritime Robotics
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We were a bit slow kicking off this year, so welcome to the first ROS Maritime Community Group meeting in 2025!

NOTE: we are moving the meeting to an hour later (9 am Pacific) starting this month, in response to past feedback. We hope this accommodates US West Coast attendees.

If you have suggestions for quality speaker candidates for future meetings or want to present your work, or have ideas for community projects for the working group to discuss, we are all ears. Please direct message @mabelzhang and @evan-palmer in a group message.

This month, we will hear from Vu Tien Luc, now at Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre, about NTU Singapore team Mecatron’s UnitySim, a simulator built on Unity3D + ROS for underwater robotics competitions such as the Singapore AUV Challenge and can be adapted for Robosub. The talk was originally given at the Singapore ROS Meetup. The simulator is closed source, but we thought the combination of Unity and ROS is still interesting for this community to see.

Description: Drone testing for autonomous missions is inherently risky; as such, code validation in simulation is crucial in saving time, costs and increasing chances of success. In this session, Luc will share about how he and his team use Unity3D, a game engine which offers quality physics and graphics, to validate autonomous programs before they are deployed on actual AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle).

Bio: Luc is the Executive Lead of Mecatron, the underwater robotics team from NTU, Singapore. He has experience with training reinforcement learning model in Unity and deploying it on an underwater drone in real life. He specialises in simulation (Unity, UE), drone software (ardupilot/px4) and is passionate about product development for AUV/UAV.

When: 2025-02-18T17:00:00Z→2025-02-18T18:00:00Z (NOTE time change!)
Where: Virtual at Launch Meeting - Zoom
Calendar event: Google Calendar
Agenda: ROS Maritime Community Group meeting agenda - Google Docs

MacatronUnitySim
MacatronUnitySim1230×692 94.3 KB

We are looking for speakers and meeting content for subsequent months this year. Please get in touch if you have ideas.

See you there!

Quick links to resources for the Community Group:

ROS Discourse Maritime category
Agenda
Google Group (only used to send meeting calendar invites)
Public Google Calendar
GitHub kanban board
GitHub community
Matrix chat

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As discussed in the meeting, by popular request, we’ve created a #marine_robotics channel on the Open Robotics Discord for the ROS Maritime Community Working Group. Please join and invite others you know who may be interested in the Community Group.

This will supersede the Matrix chat. The overall sentiment was that Discord is more convenient for people to connect and collaborate. Many people are already on Discord, so it doesn’t require people to use another app. So we’ll give it a try.

Re LinkedIn group (see meeting Agenda for notes) to publicize the meetings to new attendees, we’ll give LinkedIn publicity a few more tries before we decide whether to create a group. We don’t know how it works and whether it’s worth the effort. It could be more administrative overhead for the group organizers, who are voluntary members of the community. If you have followup tips on this, we are all ears.

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Video can be found here

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