Maritime Working Group Meeting Feb 2024: HoloOcean built on Unreal Engine

Maritime Robotics
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We are back to regular time this month, after a productive technical working meeting last month. (We’ll try to do APAC-friendly time once a quarter.)

When: 2024-02-20T16:00:00Z→2024-02-20T17:00:00Z
Where: Virtual at https://meet.google.com/rqe-tebn-xkf
Calendar event: Google Calendar
Agenda: ROS Maritime Working Group meeting agenda - Google Docs

This month, Joshua Mangelson, the Principal Investigator of HoloOcean from Brigham Young University will talk about this underwater simulator based on Unreal Engine:

“HoloOcean is a realistic underwater robotics simulator with multi-agent missions, various underwater sensors including a novel imaging sonar sensor implementation, easy installation, and simple use. It’s a fork of Holodeck, a high-fidelity reinforcement learning simulator built on Unreal Engine 4.”

(See December Maritime WG meeting for a talk on the ROS 2 bridge for HoloOcean.)

Bring your questions!

As time permits / If we have a critical mass of interested parties, we’ll update on discussions of a potential marine REP (ROS Enhancement Proposal) mentioned in the last meeting, specifically, coordinate frame conventions.

See you there!

Quick links to resources for the WG:
Agenda
GitHub kanban board
GitHub community
Matrix chat
Google Group (only used to send meeting calendar invites)

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Meeting recording (same video on Vimeo below), transcript, chat log.

Thank you so much Joshua for a very interesting talk, and everyone for attending and your thought-provoking questions. Joshua welcomes questions about his presentation on HoloOcean; you can find his email in the chat log.

Marine REP - As mentioned at the end of the meeting (see Agenda for details we didn’t have time to cover), @evan-palmer made a separate post to start a community discussion on the ROS Enhancement Proposal (REP) for marine robots.

The goal is to get a convention stated explicitly in the ROS ecosystem for marine vehicle local coordinate frames (for starters), to avoid confusions that often arise. For example, while the underwater domain uses NED, the ROS convention is ENU. We’ve been discussing with community members offline since we mentioned the REP in the January meeting, and we are seeking input from the community for convergence on a convention most people can stand behind. Look out for Evan’s separate post for more details, and we look forward to your active participation.