Automatic creation of coastal environments for marine robot simulation
Coastal Environment Generation with HoloOcean
Robotics
Summary
Testing underwater and surface robots is safer and cheaper in simulation, but these need good, realistic environments to work well. The authors created a tool that takes a simple aerial photo of a coastline and turns it into a detailed 3D scene automatically. This helps developers test their marine robots without needing expert knowledge or existing data about the area. It uses the photo to create a map of heights and places natural objects to build the environment.
marine roboticssimulationunmanned underwater vehicleunmanned surface vesselUnreal Engine 5coastal environmentheight mapenvironment generationaerial image processing
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.