ASVSim: AirSim for Surface Vehicles

NOTE: We are currently working on this documentation. You may find some incomplete or outdated information. We will update it as soon as possible.

ASVSim is a simulator for autonomous vessel research. It is a fork of the Cosys-AirSim project, which is a simulator for drones, cars and more, with extensive API support, built on Unreal Engine 5.4. ASVSim extends upon Cosys-AirSim by adding simulation of vessels. It is open-source, cross platform, and supports physically and visually realistic simulations. It is developed as an Unreal plugin that can simply be dropped into any Unreal environment. Below are screenshots of the example environments that are available in the simulator.



IDLab, (University of Antwerp - imec) created the ASVSim project to simulate autonomous vessels in realistic environments with the goal of developing and testing autonomous vessel path planning algorithms. The simulator uses Unreal Engine (5.4.X) to create a realistic environment and simulate the vessel's movement. The simulator is designed to be modular and extensible, allowing for easy integration of new features and sensors. Please contact the IDLab researchers to get more in depth information on our work or if you wish to collaborate. As IDLab focuses on autonomous vessels, the focus of this fork is on simulating vessels and their sensors. If you are interested in simulating drones, cars or other vehicles and their sensors, please refer to the Cosys-AirSim project.

This fork is based on last public AirSim release from Microsoft's GitHub. The original AirSim MIT license applies to all native AirSim source files. Please note that we use that same MIT license as which applies to all changes made by IDLab in case you plan to do anything within this repository. Do note that this repository is provided as is, will not be actively updated and comes without warranty or support. Please contact a IDLab/Cosys-Lab researcher to get more in depth information on which branch or version is best for your work.

Associated publications

@inproceedings{cosysairsim2023jansen,
  author={Jansen, Wouter and Verreycken, Erik and Schenck, Anthony and Blanquart, Jean-Edouard and Verhulst, Connor and Huebel, Nico and Steckel, Jan},
  booktitle={2023 Annual Modeling and Simulation Conference (ANNSIM)}, 
  title={COSYS-AIRSIM: A Real-Time Simulation Framework Expanded for Complex Industrial Applications}, 
  year={2023},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={37-48},
  doi={}}

You can also find the presentation of the live tutorial of Cosys-AirSim at ANNSIM '23 conference here together with the associated videos.

@inproceedings{lidarsim2022jansen,
  author={Jansen, Wouter and Huebel, Nico and Steckel, Jan},
  booktitle={2022 IEEE Sensors}, 
  title={Physical LiDAR Simulation in Real-Time Engine}, 
  year={2022},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-4},
  doi={10.1109/SENSORS52175.2022.9967197}}
}

@Article{echosim2021schouten,
  author={Schouten, Girmi and Jansen, Wouter and Steckel, Jan},
  title={Simulation of Pulse-Echo Radar for Vehicle Control and SLAM},
  JOURNAL={Sensors},
  volume={21},
  year={2021},
  number={2},
  article-number={523},
  doi={10.3390/s21020523}
}

IDLab Modifications

  • Added support for vessels (Note that vessel simulation is the main focus of this fork)
  • Added example environments and models for vessel simulation
  • Added documentation on how to use the simulator for vessel simulation
  • Added example code for training a vessel path planning algorithm using reinforcement learning in the simulator
  • Added an example of a tuned Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) path planning algorithm for vessels
  • Added support for joystick and keyboard control of vessels
  • Added MacOS support.

Cosys-Lab Modifications

  • Added support for Unreal up to 5.4 (Note that Unreal 5.3/5.4 breaks camera scene rendering by default in custom environments)
  • Added multi-layer annotation for groundtruth label generation with RGB, greyscale and texture options. Extensive API integration and available for camera and GPU-LiDAR sensors.
  • Added Instance Segmentation.
  • Added Echo sensor type for simulation of sensors like sonar and radar.
  • Added GPU LIDAR sensor type: Uses GPU acceleration to simulate a LiDAR sensor. Can support much higher point density then normal LiDAR and behaves more authentic and has realistic intensity generation.
  • Added skid steering SimMode and vehicle type. ClearPath Husky and Pioneer P3DX implemented as vehicle types using this new vehicle model.
  • Added Matlab API Client implementation as an easy to install Matlab toolbox.
  • Added various random but deterministic dynamic object types and world configuration options.
  • Added BoxCar vehicle model to the Car SimMode to have a smaller vehicle to use in indoor spaces.
  • Updated ComputerVision mode: Now has full API and Simulation just like other vehicle types. It mostly means it can now have sensors attached (outside of IMU). Improved handling and camera operation.
  • Updated LIDAR sensor type: Fixed not tracing correctly, added ground truth (point labels) generation, added range-noise generation. Improved API pointcloud delivery to be full scan instead of being frame-rate dependent and partial.
  • Updated the camera, Echo and (GPU-)LiDAR sensors to be uncoupled from the vehicle and be placed as external world sensors.
  • Updated sensors like cameras, Echo sensor and GPU-LiDAR to ignore certain objects with the MarkedIgnore Unreal tag and enabling the "IgnoreMarked" setting in the settings file.
  • Updated cameras sensor with more distortion features such as chromatic aberration, motion blur and lens distortion.
  • Updated Python ROS implementation with completely new implementation and feature set.
  • Updated C++ ROS2 implementation to support custom Cosys-AirSim features.
  • Dropped support for Unity Environments.

Some more details on our changes can be found in the changelog.

How to Get It

Download and run from packaged binary - Windows/Linux

Download and install from precompiled plugin - Windows/Linux

Install and use from source - Windows

Install and use from source - Linux

Install and use from source - MacOS

How to Use It

Documentation

View our detailed documentation on all aspects of ASVSim.

Original AirSim Paper

More technical details are available in AirSim paper (FSR 2017 Conference).

@inproceedings{airsim2017fsr,
  author = {Shital Shah and Debadeepta Dey and Chris Lovett and Ashish Kapoor},
  title = {AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles},
  year = {2017},
  booktitle = {Field and Service Robotics},
  eprint = {arXiv:1705.05065},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05065}
}

License

This project is released under the MIT License. Please review the License file for more details.