UNav-Sim: A Visually Realistic Underwater Robotics Simulator and Synthetic Data-generation Framework

TL;DR

UNav-Sim is a high-fidelity underwater robotics simulator using Unreal Engine 5, supporting autonomous navigation and ROS integration to facilitate research and algorithm transfer from simulation to real-world applications.

Contribution

It introduces the first high-detail underwater simulator with UE5 rendering and an integrated autonomous navigation stack, enhancing simulation realism and usability.

Findings

Supports realistic underwater environment rendering.

Includes an autonomous vision-based navigation system.

Open-source with ROS compatibility.

Abstract

Underwater robotic surveys can be costly due to the complex working environment and the need for various sensor modalities. While underwater simulators are essential, many existing simulators lack sufficient rendering quality, restricting their ability to transfer algorithms from simulation to real-world applications. To address this limitation, we introduce UNav-Sim, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first simulator to incorporate the efficient, high-detail rendering of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). UNav-Sim is open-source and includes an autonomous vision-based navigation stack. By supporting standard robotics tools like ROS, UNav-Sim enables researchers to develop and test algorithms for underwater environments efficiently.