A Simulation and Visualization Platform for Sailing Robots with Application to Marine Area Scanning

This paper aims to develop a simulation and visualization platform for sailing robots that enables real-time simulation, based on Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), Matlab, and MySQL database. This platform provides researchers who are unfamiliar with UE5 with a convenient 3D sailing robot testing platform by creating a bridge for data communication between UE5 and other testing platforms using the MySQL database. During the simulation process, the sailboat dynamic model and control strategies are implemented in other platforms like Matlab, Python, or C++, which has better ability in programming and mathematic calculations. UE5 has a strong physics engine for water environment simulation. A 3D sea environment for sailboats is constructed using UE5. Another platform like Matlab computes sailboat state based on the sailboat model and control strategy, then transfer data to UE5 through MySQL database. The simulation in UE5 provides a total of valuable 6 Dof data in total including sailboat 3 dimensional position and rotation data. With real-time simulation and visualization, this platform can be utilized for testing autonomous sailboat navigation or control methods and assisting remote sea experiments.