Exploring and MVP for Underwater Simulations

[AnthonZh]

Motivation

As a developer, I want to:

Build a underwater robot simulator.

So that I can:

Test robot behavior without needing to wait on pool tests.

Completion criteria

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A pool environment with at minimum Crush which has full sensor and thruster integration, integrated with ROS2 and task_planning.

Stretch

Allow the robot to be trained in simulation using RL by creating a way to turn action vector --> robot behavior.

Timeline

We want to assign this overarching project to Freshmen. The goal is to have the MVP up and working by December.

Testing requirements

We need to manually test this feature. Ideally, we can run it in tandem with the robot during pool tests.

Implementation

High-level overview

The implementation will involve a simulator (e.g. OceanSim, Stonefish) which can render our robots in a pool. Then, once we run task_planning, these robots should take the same actions the robot would do in an actual pool.

Checklist

• Underwater Environment Created
• Robot URDF integrated with the simulator environment
• Robot integrated with ROS2
• Simulator tested against real life behavior

Additional notes

This is a large project broken into subissues.