HiFi-Sim: A High-Fidelity Simulation Platform for Intelligence Assessment of USV

The Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) is one of important equipments for river and marine activities. During the development stage, full process simulation plays a key role due to the coupling relationship between the USV sub-systems. Nonetheless, there are few open source platforms available in the community, and existing ones are outdated and not suitable for intelligent evaluation. Thus, we propose this paper to promote our platform, a simulation platform for USV. The biggest feature lies in its high fidelity, mainly manifested in the following aspects. First, a great deal of effort was put into building the river scenes in Unity, where the lighting and rendering characteristics can be well guaranteed. Second, the input and output controls are achieved through Robot Operating System (ROS), which is test-friendly for personnel engaged in unmanned system development. Third, we have developed and imported a large number of sensor plugins in Unity to ensure various types of sensor data, including multiple cameras and LiDARs, and that is vital for evaluating intelligent algorithms of USV. Integration between ROS and Unity is achieved through TCP/IP communication, facilitating data transfer via topic-based mechanisms. Environmental impacts are also taken into account by including water wave, wind and rain scripts in Unity3D. We have conduced some representative experiments of USV to verify its effectiveness, including direct LiDAR odometry and water segmentation.