Development of a Simulator for the Study of Path Planning of An Autonomous Surface Vehicle in Lake Environments

Path planning is a relevant topic in robotics research because it allows an autonomous vehicle to find a collision-free route. Local path planning is important because it copes with the changing conditions in a dynamic environment. The Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) are a type of vehicles that have been studied in the last 25 years, and also in many applications requires a local path planning for collision avoidance. Before facing the obstacles of deploying in real vehicles or hardware it is important to test different techniques in a simulator. This work presents the development of a simulator for an autonomous surface vehicle after evaluating two possible frameworks that could act as a base platform, the Robotarium and the Matlab robotics toolbox with the robotics operating system. A developed simulator is then tailored to the case of the Ypacarai Lake and some tests were carried out to follow a set of waypoints in this environment. One additional feature of the simulator is that the waypoints are set using Voronoi graphs.