Unity ASV Simulator

Maritime Robotics
1

I’m “releasing” a project I built for simulating surface vehicles in Unity (with ROS).

Here’s the project: GitHub - edvart-ros/unity_asv_sim: Simulation platform for Unmanned/Autonomous surface vehicles implemented in Unity, with ROS 2 integration.
The project is meant as a way to get started with ASV simulation in Unity, and is somewhat barebones, though it has a few features which makes setting up your own ASV simulation pretty easy, in my opinion. Since it’s Unity, its very easy to extend the simulator with custom behaviour using C# scripts.
Generally, I’ve found Unity to be quite nice to work with for robotics simulation, though there’s stuff Gazebo gives you for free that Unity doesn’t.

Key points and features:

  • Uses the Unity High Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP), making it easy to create realistic looking scenes with physically-based environments.
  • The HDRP Water System (quite new) is used to simulate the ocean
  • Includes a simplified water interaction implementation (water physics) which can be applied to custom vehicle models
  • Includes a variety of sensors, all publishing proper ROS data (lidar, RGB and depth camera, IMU)
  • Simple configurable propulsion system for automatic control

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5 Likes
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Very cool! Congratulations on the official release! What surface vehicles have you done testing with/are currently supported?

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I’ve used the WAM-V for most of the development. I’ve tested a bunch of other vessels too, though. It’s easy to make stuff float, but I haven’t validated any of the hydrodynamics with real data. I wouldn’t use this simulator to tune a control system, but it’s useful for higher-level testing.

In this picture there’s 4 different vessels:

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In the wiki, there’s a quick guide on how to setup a custom surface vehicle: Set up a custom scene with a custom USV · edvart-ros/unity_asv_sim Wiki · GitHub

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Looks great! Really appreciate the documentation. How can you change the wave parameters?

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Thats all in the ocean object. Check Unity’s “HDRP Water System” docs Use the Water System in your Project | High Definition RP | 14.0.11

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