OceanVoySim: Visualization Platform for Sailing Robots with Dynamic Marine Environments

Testing unmanned surface vehicles (USV) in complex marine environments such as varying winds, currents, and climates is challenging, especially for sailing robots, a type of USV driven by wind. Since simulating these conditions more accurately can enhance efficiency in real experiments, it is essential to establish and improve a simulation platform for sailing robots. This paper aims to develop a visualization platform with dynamic marine environments called OceanVoySim using Unreal Engine 5. For the sailboat model, fabric parameters enable the sail to exhibit detailed changes under the influence of the wind, and cameras can capture the robot's motions from different views. Besides, a simulated coast landscape is created to display external scenes more realistically. Additionally, we set up an adjustable weather and illumination system by editing blueprints and material attributes. Based on these, the platform provides information to compare with the real data. To sum up, we have improved the visualization platform for the sailboat to adapt to real environments and verified its reliability.