Hardware in the Loop Simulator for a Coral Reef Monitoring Robot (C-Bot)

Ocean exploration and monitoring are vital to discover new resources and check the effects of pollution on marine health. Recent studies are focused on deploying remotely operated or autonomous underwater vehicles to achieve this task. However, a hybrid underwater vehicle (HROV) proves to be much more effective in performing such operations since it can be operated both as a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). This paper presents hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation developed for C-Bot HROV using ROS middleware and Gazebo simulator. This technique is essential to safely test the algorithms, especially the control and guidance algorithms on the vehicle hardware in a simulated underwater environment without operating it in the real world. The mission file for autonomous vehicle operation is defined using a custom tag-based approach. A python-based graphical user interface (GUI) is developed to monitor and command the vehicle from the ground control station (GCS). The sensor data visualization is performed using RViz on the GCS.