A Universal Simulation Framework of Shipborne Inertial Sensors Based on the Ship Motion Model and Robot Operating System

Qianfeng Jing,Bin Hu,Yong Yin,Haichao Wang,Xiuwen Liu

doi:10.3390/jmse9080900

Qianfeng Jing, Bin Hu + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse9080900

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Abstract

A complete virtual test environment is a powerful tool for Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) research, and the simulation of ship motion and shipborne sensors is one of the prerequisites for constructing such an environment. This paper proposed a universal simulation framework of shipborne inertial sensors. A ship motion model considering environmental disturbances is proposed to simulate the six-degrees-of-freedom motion of ships. The discrete form of the inertial sensor stochastic error model is derived. The inertial measurement data are simulated by adding artificial errors to a simulated motion status. In addition, the ship motion simulation, inertial measurement simulation, and environment simulation nodes are implemented based on the computational graph architecture of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The benefit from the versatility of the ROS messages, the format of simulated inertial measurement is exactly the same as that of real sensors, which provides a research basis for the fusion perception algorithm based on visual–inertial and laser–inertial sensors in the research field of ASVs.

Highlights

Autonomous vehicles are often unsafe and expensive during the testing phase, which limits the completeness verification of related algorithms in diverse scenarios
Since the deterministic error was only a fixed offset or scaling of the original data, we focused on the simulation of stochastic errors
The physical-based ship motion model was integrated with the Robot Operating System to simulate the shipborne inertial sensors

Summary

Introduction

Autonomous vehicles are often unsafe and expensive during the testing phase, which limits the completeness verification of related algorithms in diverse scenarios. Since shipborne sensors are generally fixedly connected to the hull, sensor information such as camera images or LiDAR point clouds will be affected by the ship motions, which brings challenges to the accuracy and stability of perception algorithms. It follows that the inertial sensor is one of the indispensable shipborne sensors used in target perception [6] and egomotion state estimation [7]. The reliability of testing results is highly dependent on the accuracy of simulation models

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Discussion

Conclusion