UTSeaSim is a custom-designed naval surface navigation simulator that was designed to realistically model ship movement constraints in marine environments. The UTSeaSim simulator is written as a supporting platform for research on autonomous sea navigation. It uses realistic 2D physical models of marine environments and sea vessels, and runs both in GUI and in non-GUI modes.
The simulator's core contains three main modules:
The sea environment module includes models of winds, water currents, waves, and obstacles. The ship module models all relevant aspects of a ship, including the ship's physical properties, sensing capabilities, and ship actuators. The decision making-module implements an agent that controls a ship autonomously. At each time step, the agent receives the perceptions sensed by the ship, processes them to update its current world state, and decides on control actions for the ship based on its current world state and its decision-making strategy.All of the above components are plug-and-play: each one can easily be replaced by a component of the same type that uses alternative modeling. This includes the agent's perception processing algorithms, world model, and decision making strategy; the ship's model; and the different environmental models.