Hardware-Accelerated Geometrical Simulation of Biological and Engineered In-Air Ultrasonic Systems

TL;DR

SonoTraceUE is a real-time, high-fidelity acoustic simulation framework integrated with Unreal Engine, enabling dynamic, multi-material environment modeling for bioacoustic and robotic applications with validated accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces SonoTraceUE, a novel GPU-accelerated acoustic simulation plugin for Unreal Engine supporting dynamic scenes, diffraction, and closed-loop robotic integration.

Findings

High correlation with real-world acoustic data

Supports dynamic, multi-material environments

Enables rapid prototyping and hypothesis testing

Abstract

The deployment of in-air acoustic sensors for industrial monitoring and autonomous robotics has grown significantly, often drawing inspiration from biological echolocation. However, developing and validating these systems in existing simulation frameworks remains challenging due to the computational cost of simulating high-frequency wave propagation in large, dynamic, and complex environments. While wave-based methods offer high accuracy, they scale poorly with frequency and volume. Conversely, existing geometric acoustic solvers often lack support for dynamic scenes, complex diffraction, or closed-loop robotic integration. In this work, we introduce SonoTraceUE, a high-fidelity acoustic simulation framework built as a plugin for Unreal Engine. By using a hardware-accelerated ray tracing-based specular reflection model, and a curvature-based Monte Carlo diffraction model, the system enables near real-time simulation of active and passive acoustic sensing in dynamic, multi-material environments. We validate the framework through two distinct experimental domains: a bioacoustic study and a robotics experiment. Our results demonstrate that SonoTraceUE achieves high correlation with real-world spectral and spatial data. The framework provides a versatile platform for synthetic data generation, hypothesis testing in bioacoustics, and the rapid prototyping of closed-loop robotic systems that use acoustic sensing.