AAM-SEALS: Developing Aerial-Aquatic Manipulators in SEa, Air, and Land Simulator

TL;DR

AAM-SEALS introduces a comprehensive simulator for aerial, aquatic, and land manipulators, enabling seamless operation and learning across diverse environments with high-fidelity physics and photorealistic visuals.

Contribution

We developed AAM-SEALS, the first integrated simulator for aerial, aquatic, and land manipulators, featuring advanced controllers and particle-based hydrodynamics for realistic environment transitions.

Findings

Smooth operation across environments demonstrated

High-fidelity simulation validated through real-world comparisons

Open-source code and data available for community use

Abstract

Current mobile manipulators and high-fidelity simulators lack the ability to seamlessly operate and simulate across integrated environments spanning sea, air, and land. To address this gap, we introduce Aerial-Aquatic Manipulators (AAMs) in SEa, Air, and Land Simulator (SEALS), a comprehensive and photorealistic simulator designed for AAMs to operate and learn in these diverse environments. The development of AAM-SEALS tackles several significant challenges, including the creation of integrated controllers for flying, swimming, and manipulation, and the high-fidelity simulation of aerial dynamics and hydrodynamics leveraging particle-based hydrodynamics. Our evaluation demonstrates smooth operation and photorealistic transitions across air, water, and their interfaces. We quantitatively validate the fidelity of particle-based hydrodynamics by comparing position-tracking errors across real-world and simulated systems. AAM-SEALS benefits a broad range of robotics communities, including robot learning, aerial robotics, underwater robotics, mobile manipulation, and robotic simulators. We will open-source our code and data to foster the advancement of research in these fields. The overview video is available at https://youtu.be/MbqIIrYvR78. Visit our project website at https://aam-seals.umd.edu for more details.