Development of a side scan sonar module for the underwater simulator

In this paper, we implemented the Side Scan Sonar (SSS) module for the UnderWater Simulator (UWSim) [1], specifically focusing on sonar image simulation. To obtain the simulated SSS images, we adopted the Lambertian diffusion model [2]. The beam profile was modeled using a pair of sine wave functions. We developed this sonar module in the UWSim which runs on Robot Operating System (ROS) framework. For validation, we applied feature matching to the obtained sonar images, and examined the inliers and matching performance.