Kelpie: A ROS-Based Multi-robot Simulator for Water Surface and Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Testing and debugging real hardware is a time consuming task, in particular for the case of aquatic robots, for which it is necessary to transport and deploy the robots on the water. Performing waterborne and airborne field experiments with expensive hardware embedded in not yet fully functional prototypes is a highly risky endeavour. In this sense, physicsbased 3D simulators are key for a fast paced and affordable development of such robotic systems. This paper contributes with a modular, open-source, and soon to be freely online available, ROS-based multi-robot simulator specially focused for aerial and water surface vehicles. This simulator is being developed as part of the RIVERWATCH experiment in the ECHORD european FP7 project. This experiment aims at demonstrating a multi-robot system for remote monitoring of riverine environments.

Desarrollo de un modelo de robot aplicado a la educación y simulación en entornos virtuales con ros: Especificaciones del modelo robot uniciclo edubot-v4

“…En cuanto a desarrollos más recientes de simuladores virtuales de robots aplicados al campo de la investigación y la experimentación en tecnología, encontramos ejemplos como Roborobo!, un simulador de robots destinado a ser usado, fundamentalmente, en robótica colectiva o en robótica de enjambres (Bredeche et al 2013). Mendonça et al (2013) desarrollan un simulador basado en el ya mencionado framework ROS para aplicarlo, de manera específica, a físicas en entornos simulados en desplazamiento e interacción en aire y entornos acuáticos. En otra línea, Collins et al (2016) también realizan su aportación con Rebots, un simulador enfocado de manera específica a robots autoconfigurables.…”

A Survey on Data Quality for Dependable Monitoring in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Simulation is used when the physical characteristics to be measured can be accurately and predictably modeled. These models can be used in all types of scenarios, but most studies present examples based on terrestrial (indoor) applications [ 49 ], whereas the theme of the work herein concentrates on the complexity of the aquatic environment (e.g., water circulation). It is for this exact reason that current aquatic systems do not support real-time model-based data fusion [ 50 ].…”

A critical survey on marsupial robotic teams for environmental monitoring of water bodies

“…Refer to [39] for a survey on underwater simulators. The choice for simulating surface vehicles is narrower; nevertheless there are a few simulators currently in development, such as MARS [40] and Kelpie [41]. While MARS allows both underwater and surface vehicles, Kelpie simulates aerial and water surface vehicles.…”