Design and Implementation of a Modular UUV Simulation Platform

The complex and time-varying marine environment puts forward demanding requirements for the structural design and algorithm development of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). It is inevitable to repeatedly evaluate the feasibility of autonomy schemes to enhance the intelligence and security of the UUV before putting it into use. Considering the high cost of the UUV hardware platform and the high risk of underwater experiments, this study aims to evaluate and optimize autonomy schemes in the manner of software-in-loop (SIL) simulation efficiently. Therefore, a self-feedback development framework is proposed and a multi-interface, programmable modular simulation platform for UUV based on a robotic operating system (ROS) is designed. The platform integrates the 3D marine environment, UUV models, sensor plugins, motion control plugins in a modular manner, and reserves programming interfaces for users to test various algorithms. Subsequently, we demonstrate the simulation details with cases, such as single UUV path planning, task scheduling, and multi-UUV formation control, and construct underwater experiments to confirm the feasibility of the simulation platform. Finally, the extensibility of the simulation platform and the related performance analysis are discussed.