System Description

The Robotic Operating System (ROS) (https://www.ros.org) and the Gazebo simulation environment (http://gazebosim.org), provide the foundational software infrastructure for the OceanWATERS simulation. ROS is essentially middleware for inter-process communication (IPC), but there are a number of components from various sources that have been adapted to utilize ROS IPC (including Gazebo). Gazebo provides a framework for physical and visual simulation of robotic systems and their environments. For OceanWATERS, the Gazebo integration of the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) (https://www.ode.org) is utilized to provide physical simulation. A high level open source graphics library, Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE) (https://www.ogre3d.org), is utilized by Gazebo for rendering, and OGRE in turn utilizes open standard OpenGL graphics (https://www.opengl.org) for low level rendering.

A high-level data flow diagram is shown below.

OceanWATERS architecture diagram.