Welcome to ROS2 package for Stonefish

Stonefish: an advanced simulation tool developed for marine robotics

Stonefish is a C++ library combining a physics engine and a lightweight rendering pipeline. The physics engine is based on the core functionality of the Bullet Physics library, extended to deliver realistic simulation of marine robots. It is directed towards researchers in the field of marine robotics but can as well be used as a general purpose robot simulator.

Stonefish includes advanced hydrodynamics computation based on actual geometry of bodies to better approximate hydrodynamic forces and allow for effects not possible when using symbolic models. The rendering pipeline, developed from the ground up, delivers realistic rendering of atmosphere, ocean and underwater environment. Special focus was put on the latter, where effects of wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering were considered.

Stonefish library can be used to create custom standalone simulators or combined with a Robot Operating System (ROS) package, called stonefish_ros2, which delivers a convenient way to use the Stonefish potential in a ROS2-oriented environment.

ROS2 package for Stonefish

The stonefish_ros2 package delivers an implementation of a standard simulator node. The standard simulator is a graphical type simulator, which loads the description of the simulation scenario from an XML file.

The syntax of the scenario description files is explained in detail in the Stonefish library documentation. The stonefish_ros2 package extends this syntax, to include ROS2 specific definitions, through subclassing of the original XML parser class. The new parser is able to support finding files in other ROS2 packages, parsing parameters, as well as creating necessary publishers, subscribers and services automatically.

After the simulation scenario is constructed based on the description, the simulation automatically starts. With each simulation step, the readings of the selected sensors are published using appropriate ROS2 topics and the setpoints of the robots’ actuators are updated based on incoming ROS2 messages. The sensor publishing is defined through a set of functions, constituting a Stonefish-ROS2 interface. Moreover, some functions of the library are exposed through services.

Cite Me

This software was written and is continuously developed by Patryk Cieślak.

If you find this software useful in your research, please cite:

Patryk Cieślak, “Stonefish: An Advanced Open-Source Simulation Tool Designed for Marine Robotics, With a ROS Interface”, In Proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2019, June 2019, Marseille, France

@inproceedings{stonefish,
   author = "Cie{\'s}lak, Patryk",
   booktitle = "OCEANS 2019 - Marseille",
   title = "Stonefish: An Advanced Open-Source Simulation Tool Designed for Marine Robotics, With a ROS Interface",
   month = "jun",
   year = "2019",
   doi = "10.1109/OCEANSE.2019.8867434"
}

Support

I offer paid support on setting up the simulation of your own systems, including necessary 3D modelling (simplification of CAD models for physics, preparation of accurate visualisations, etc.), setup of simulation scenarios, development of new sensors, actuators, and custom features that do not require significant changes to the code base. Please contact me at [patryk.cieslak@udg.edu](mailto:patryk.cieslak@udg.edu).

Funding

Currently there is no funding of this work. It is developed by the author following his needs and requests from other users.