Design and Simulation of a Test Environment for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

Game Engines are modern off-the-shelf, sophisticated simulation
software that have proven beneficial when developing simulation
testbeds for intelligent control of UVs. They readily provide the
required physics, modeling, and rendering capabilities thereby
reducing vehicle development time. In this paper, Unity 3D Game
Engine is used to design and simulate an underwater environment
for testing navigation of underwater vehicles. Various underwater
scenarios were developed to test the functionality of the underwater
environment by creating C# scripts and utilizing the internal physics
properties of the Unity software. A virtual autonomous underwater
vehicle was designed and deployed into the simulated environment
to test the performance of the environment. Patrol scripts as well as
obstacle avoidance scripts were written in C# programming
language to condition the underwater vehicle in the simulated
environment. The results showed that the underwater environment
can test for navigation and patrol of Autonomous Underwater
Vehicles.