Stonefish: An Advanced Open-Source Simulation Tool Designed for Marine Robotics, With a ROS Interface

Abstract

The marine robotics community is lacking a high quality simulator for doing scientific research, especially when it comes to testing control and vision algorithms in realistic underwater intervention tasks. All of the solutions used today are either outdated or try to combine different software tools, which often results in bad performance, stability issues and lack of important features. This paper presents a new software tool, focused on, but not limited to, simulation of intervention autonomous underwater vehicles (I-AUV). It delivers advanced hydrodynamics based on actual geometry, simulation of underwater sensors and actuators, as well as realistic rendering of underwater environment and ocean surface. It consists of a library written in C++ and a Robot Operating System (ROS) package.