Integration of Gazebo and ROS for Underwater Vehicle Environment

In today’s times, unmanned and manned underwater vehicles are required to efficiently carry out shallow and deep-water ocean exploration, localization, inspection and intervention applications. Given the complexity and extreme challenges of deep underwater and real-time applications, unmanned underwater vehicles such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) would be required to carry out the tasks [1]. However, AUVs and ROVs are extremely expensive. Hence, it is imperative to carry out extensive simulation-based analysis first [2]. In this paper, the performance of the underwater vehicle is analyzed by integrating Gazebo and ROS (Robot Operating System). The performance is analyzed over different trajectories such as circular, helical, and shortest path; and the position error and heading error are calculated for all trajectories.