ASVLite: a high-performance simulator for autonomous surface vehicles
This provides a practical tool for researchers and developers working on control strategies for ASVs in marine environments, though it is incremental in improving simulation efficiency.
The paper tackles the lack of computationally efficient simulators for autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) in wave environments by presenting ASVLite, which uses frequency domain analysis to achieve high run-time performance, simulating up to 500 ASVs and 260 wave components on low-power hardware.
The energy of ocean waves is the key distinguishing factor of marine environments compared to other aquatic environments such as lakes and rivers. Waves significantly affect the dynamics of marine vehicles; hence it is imperative to consider the dynamics of vehicles in waves when developing efficient control strategies for autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs). However, most marine simulators available open-source either exclude dynamics of vehicles in waves or use methods with high computational overhead. This paper presents ASVLite, a computationally efficient ASV simulator that uses frequency domain analysis for wave force computation. ASVLite is suitable for applications requiring low computational overhead and high run-time performance. Our tests on a Raspberry Pi 2 and a mid-range desktop computer show that the simulator has a high run-time performance to efficiently simulate irregular waves with a component wave count of up to 260 and large-scale swarms of up to 500 ASVs.