Autoferry Gemini: A real-time simulation platform for electromagnetic radiation sensors on autonomous ships

Abstract

Testing that ships are compliant to specified safety requirements have traditionally relied on real world data, which is not scalable and limited to testable scenarios due to financial and ethical reasons. Low fidelity simulations have been used to counteract some of these problems, which is sufficient for emulating simpler systems such as radar detectors, but not for testing complex systems as found in computer vision. In the automotive industry the use of game engines have shown to be a great testing platform due to their customizability, and combination of real-time physics with computer graphics to create large volumes of high fidelity images. In the work presented here, development of an open-source maritime platform named Autoferry Gemini based on the Unity game engine is used to simulate sensors in real-time. Utilizing simulated optics and general purpose GPU programs, the render pipeline is capable of modeling lidar, radar, visible-light and infrared camera sensors simultaneously. Results from visible-light cameras and lidar have already proven to satisfy other research activities on sensor fusion for autonomous ship technology. Infrared cameras motivates further research in gathering empirical data, while GPU algorithms have made it possible to simulate 3D radar models and multiple lidar types in real-time.