Underwater visuals in Gazebo

General
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1

Hello, I am looking for plugins ways of improving the underwater visuals of gazebo I have been looking at projects as VRX, asv_wave_sim and GitHub - osrf/mbari_wec_gz: Simulation of wave energy harvesting buoy.

But as far as I understand, their visuals are for the visualization of water from surface robots and not from an underwater robot where I want to simulate the effects of recording a video in an underwater environment.

Right now I am looking at this great project and trying to adapt it to my necessities: GitHub - clydemcqueen/orca4: ROS2 AUV based on the BlueROV2, ArduSub and Navigation2

Hope you can help me.

Thanks in advance

2

anyone has any thoughts on this topic?

3

Hei @Javier_Navarro99 ,

Do you want to improve the visualization of the underwater environment?

If yes, you have to create a “.world” file.

You can be inspired by Dave project:

or UUV:

Good luck!

Markus

4

There is also support for fog in new Gazebo. Maybe it could be misused to create the intended visual effect of underwater cameras.

5

Hello, both of you thanks a lot.

Yes the visuals for the visualization of gazebo are good enough as there is a model called waves that simulates ocean waves and looks very good, for the “sea/ocean color” there is also a trick to make the world look turquoise:

    <scene>
      <!-- For turquoise ambient -->
      <ambient>0.0 1.0 1.0</ambient>
      <background>0.0 0.7 0.8</background>
    </scene>

Although I would like to make the scene dependent on the gazebo’s sim height so I only simulate the blue sea but the rest looks normal.

My doubt is mainly how to simulate water turbidity and particles and all that. And yes I have looked at the particle emitter but it has a bug where the color range cannot be set in gazebo harmonic and the fog simulator doesn’t work neither for turbidity:

This is the model: https://app.gazebosim.org/mabelzhang/fuel/models/Turquoise%20turbidity%20generator

And there is an issue with that with the new ogre version, and they recommend to deactivate: Disable setting particle emitter color range by iche033 · Pull Request #903 · gazebosim/gz-rendering · GitHub

As I have more things to implement in my project I haven’t tried to fix that, and I don’t know much about ogre2 so I don’t think I will be able to fix it either.

Thanks for your help.

6

Hey everyone! We had some great discussions on this thread earlier. Does anyone have more insights, updates, or questions on improved underwater visuals? I’d love to hear your thoughts!