HoloOcean: A Full-Featured Marine Robotics Simulator for Perception and Autonomy

Easton Potokar, Kalliyan Lay, Kalin Norman, Derek Benham, Spencer Ashford, Randy Pierce, Tracianne B. Neilsen, Michael Kaess, Joshua G Mangelson

Abstract:

Abstract—Due to the difficulty and expense of underwater field
trials, a high-fidelity underwater simulator is a necessity for testing
and developing algorithms. To fill this need, we present HoloOcean,
an open-source underwater simulator, built upon Unreal Engine 4
(UE4). HoloOcean comes equipped with multiagent support, various sensor implementations of common underwater sensors, and
simulated communications support. Due to being built upon UE4,
new environments are straightforward to add, enabling easy extensions to be built. HoloOcean is controlled via a simple Python
interface, allowing simple installation via pip, and requiring few
lines of code to execute simulations. Each agent is equipped with
various control schemes and dynamics that can be customized via
the Python interface. Also included is a novel sonar sensor framework that leverages an octree representation of the environment
for efficient and realistic sonar imagery generation. In addition,
to improve the authenticity of the imaging sonar simulation, we
use a novel cluster-based multipath ray-tracing algorithm, various
probabilistic noise models, and properties of reflecting surfaces.We
also leverage the sonar simulation framework to simulate sidescan,
single-beam, and multibeam profiling sonars.

Index Terms—Marine, open source, robotics, simulation, sonar,
unreal.