MARUS - A Marine Robotics Simulator

Abstract

Marine robotics requires high quality simulators due to complexity and availability of trials at sea. While there are several simulators in the literature, these have gaps in applications requiring high visual fidelity and human-robot interaction. This paper describes Marine Robotics Unity Simulator (MARUS), an open-source simulator for marine robotics based on Unity3D software that aims to close those gaps. It can simulate multi-robot systems in a marine environment offering water physics and a wide array of sensors commonly used in underwater and maritime domain. An interface allowing inter-connectivity with the simulator was developed where the focus was put on ROS 1/2 integration preferred in robotics community. Due to growing requirements on high-fidelity visual simulation required for machine learning, tools were developed for enabling dataset generation with automatic annotations. Examples of simulator application demonstrate the capabilities of the simulator for real world problems encountered during research project development.