Coastal environments generated automatically from images for marine robots
Coastal Environment Generation with HoloOcean
Robotics
Summary
Testing underwater and surface robots safely is hard because realistic ocean scenes are needed. The authors made a tool that creates detailed coastal environments automatically using just a single overhead photo. This helps developers test their robot software in many different ocean-like settings without having to build scenes manually or have expert knowledge. The tool uses the image to estimate the shape of the land and water and places objects like rocks or plants accordingly. This can save time and resources when developing marine robots.
What this means in practice
- •For marine robotics developers: Create realistic coastal simulation environments automatically for testing UUV and USV autonomy algorithms without manual scene building.
- •For game designers: Generate realistic coastal landscapes quickly in Unreal Engine 5 using overhead images to populate scenes with natural assets.
Authors
Abigail Austin, Brady Moon, Joshua G. Mangelson
Abstract
Marine robotic simulation provides a safe and inexpensive method of developing and testing algorithms for unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) and unmanned surface vessel (USV) autonomy and perception before full field deployment. However, these simulations are often limited by the availability of simulated environments. Current marine robotics simulation suites offer manual ways to edit or create environments, but they require existing data or specialized knowledge of the environment system. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Unreal Engine 5 level generation pipeline that enables automatic creation of coastal environments for HoloOcean. Our pipeline relies on a user-provided overhead image of a coastal scene. The pipeline then uses the image to generate height map data, as well as automatically select assets and place them in the environment.