SwarmSwIM: A Simulator for Underwater Swarms of Robots

Simulation plays a crucial role in the design, testing, and validation of underwater multi-robot systems, enabling algorithm development in a controlled environment. While high-fidelity dynamic models are essential for certain applications, many multi-robot and swarm control strategies prioritize local control emulation and high-level decision-making over full-scale dynamics. We present SwarmSwIM, a modular simulation platform designed to support a wide range of control schemes and sensor models for underwater multi-robot systems. The simulator provides tools for current modeling, visual representation and rendering, and ROS integration, balancing computational efficiency with sufficient environmental fidelity to facilitate large-scale swarm simulations.