Tutorial TEAM:

Technology Enablers for Autonomous Maritime Robotics: Digital Twins with Simulations and Cloud-enabled Massive Scale Datasets for Experimentation and Validation

Tutorial at ICRA’23 in London, UK on May 29, 2023

Digital Twins support various aspects during the development of software-intensive system functions: Retrospective system analysis using collected data from the past, system experimentation using simulators with high-fidelity system models, as well as prediction of system properties based on a combination of data and simulations

In this tutorial, we are presenting and experimenting with two essential aspects for Digital Twins: (A) open-loop and (B) closed-loop verification & validation (V&V) instruments

We introduce the high-quality and high-resolution dataset Reeds, to overcome present challenges in existing datasets such as low situational variability or poor annotations. This dataset originates from an instrumented 13m boat with six high-performance vision sensors, two three LIDARs lidars, a 360° radar, a 360° documentation camera system, and a three-antenna RTK-enabled GNSS system as well as a fiber optic gyro IMU used for ground truth measurements, an advanced weather sensor, and an AIS receiver.

Next to the data, we present the high-fidelity simulator MARUS that offers advanced capabilities of generating realistic maritime environments allowing for closer-to-reality V&V of applications developed for maritime vehicles. The simulator offers synthetic dataset generation with perfect annotations for various sensors (cameras, LIDARlidar, sonar, radar) and allows for interaction with the environment for closed loop simulation.

The tutorial is structured as follows: 

  • Welcome and Introduction
  • Part A – Lectures
  • Part B – Interactive Tutorials: Installation guide for the MARUS can be found on MARUS GitHub wiki.
  • Part C – Interactive Panel Discussion with Professor Fredrik Heintz from Linköping University, Sweden and Dr. Enrica Zereik from Institute of Marine Engineering, Italy as panelists. 

The tutorial will be arranged jointly by the team behind the Reeds project at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies – LABUST at University of Zagreb in Croatia.