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Welcome to the VRX Wiki

This Wiki provides technical documentation and tutorials for the VRX Simulation Environment, as well as virtual events and competitions that the VRX environment supports.

The VRX Simulation Environment

The general-purpose VRX Simulation Environment is an extensible foundation designed to support the design, development and evaluation of uncrewed surface vessel (USV) autonomy. The original impetus for the development of the simulation infrastructure is the following series of competitions:

• The Virtual RobotX (VRX) Competitions: 2023, 2022, 2019
• The 2019 RobotX Interactive Forum Hackathon (PDF)
• The Virtual Ocean Robotics Challenge (VORC)

Because of the similarities with the RobotBoat, the team has added worlds and models to support teams developing RoboBoat solutions (link coming soon...)

Independently, the maritime robotics community has adapted and extended the VRX simulation environment to support innovations in perception, learning and control - as well as new applications for USV capabilities The simulation capability. See citations of our OCEANS paper. Specific examples include...

• Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Motion Control for Unmanned Surface Vehicles with Environmental Disturbances
• Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance for USVs Using Cross-Domain Deep Reinforcement Learning and Neural Network Model Predictive Controller
• Vision-Guided UAV Landing on a Swaying Ocean Platform in Simulation
• COLREG-Compliant Simulation Environment for Verifying USV Motion Planning Algorithms with source code
• Multi-domain inspection of offshore wind farms using an autonomous surface vehicle

As of Release 2.0, the VRX Simulation Environment now runs with Gazebo Sim and Ros 2 by default. This is the recommended starting point for new users, and the tutorials linked below assume this configuration.

The VRX 2023 Competition

The VRX 2023 competition is coming up this fall! Follow the link above for an overview of the competition and information about how to participate.

Tutorials

How to use the VRX Simulation Environment.

VRX Classic

Users who wish to maintain compatibility with Gazebo Classic and ROS 1 may do so by building against the gazebo_classic branch of this repository.

• Click here to access the Wiki pages for VRX Classic.
• Important: We will be transitioning the gazebo_classic branch from an officially supported branch to a community supported branch by Spring 2023.

How to Cite

If you use the VRX simulation in your work, please cite our summary publication, "Toward Maritime Robotic Simulation in Gazebo".

@InProceedings{bingham19toward,
  Title                    = {Toward Maritime Robotic Simulation in Gazebo},
  Author                   = {Brian Bingham and Carlos Aguero and Michael McCarrin and Joseph Klamo and Joshua Malia and Kevin Allen and Tyler Lum and Marshall Rawson and Rumman Waqar},
  Booktitle                = {Proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS Conference},
  Year                     = {2019},
  Address                  = {Seattle, WA},
  Month                    = {October}
}