Hardware ROV simulation facility for the evaluation of novel underwater manipulation techniques

In this paper we describe a hardware facility to simulate movements of a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) in a water basin for the evaluation of novel underwater manipulation techniques as it was build at the underwater robotics department of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen. The three main functionalities of the ROV simulator are to drive predefined static trajectories (e.g. recorded from real ROV mission movements), to virtually generate realistic ROV movements to approximate the desired ROV behavior and to let the system react in a realistic way to forces emerging while one of the attached manipulators interacts with an object. For the realistic ROV movement generation we are using a vectorial model representation of the simulated ROV based on established dynamic equations of motion for six degrees of freedom.