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Welcome to the VRX Wiki

This Wiki provides technical documentation and tutorials for the VRX Simulation Environment, as well as virtual events and competitions that the VRX environment supports.

The VRX Simulation Environment

The versatile VRX Simulation Environment serves as an extensible framework dedicated to facilitating the design, development, and evaluation of uncrewed surface vessel (USV) autonomy. Initially conceived to address the demands of various competitions, such as:

• Virtual RobotX (VRX) Competitions 2023
• 2022
• 2019
• 2019 RobotX Interactive Forum Hackathon (PDF)
• Virtual Ocean Robotics Challenge (VORC)

Given the parallels with RobotBoat, the team has expanded the environment by incorporating worlds and models to specifically support teams engaged in developing RoboBoat solutions (link coming soon...).

The VRX simulation environment has been embraced by the maritime robotics research and development community, evolving to accommodate advancements in perception, learning, and control, along with exploring novel applications for USV capabilities. Refer to citations of our OCEANS paper for further details. Notable examples include:

• Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Motion Control for Unmanned Surface Vehicles with Environmental Disturbances
• Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance for USVs Using Cross-Domain Deep Reinforcement Learning and Neural Network Model Predictive Controller
• Vision-Guided UAV Landing on a Swaying Ocean Platform in Simulation
• COLREG-Compliant Simulation Environment for Verifying USV Motion Planning Algorithms with corresponding source code
• Multi-domain inspection of offshore wind farms using an autonomous surface vehicle

As of Release 2.0, the VRX Simulation Environment now runs with Gazebo Sim and ROS 2 by default. This is the recommended starting point for new users, and the tutorials linked below assume this configuration.

The VRX 2023 Competition

The VRX 2023 competition is coming up this fall! Follow the link above for an overview of the competition and information about how to participate.

Tutorials

How to use the VRX Simulation Environment.

VRX Classic

Users who wish to maintain compatibility with Gazebo Classic and ROS 1 may do so by building against the gazebo_classic branch of this repository.

• Click here to access the Wiki pages for VRX Classic.
• Important: We will be transitioning the gazebo_classic branch from an officially supported branch to a community supported branch by Spring 2023.

How to Cite

If you use the VRX simulation in your work, please cite our summary publication, "Toward Maritime Robotic Simulation in Gazebo".

@InProceedings{bingham19toward,
  Title                    = {Toward Maritime Robotic Simulation in Gazebo},
  Author                   = {Brian Bingham and Carlos Aguero and Michael McCarrin and Joseph Klamo and Joshua Malia and Kevin Allen and Tyler Lum and Marshall Rawson and Rumman Waqar},
  Booktitle                = {Proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS Conference},
  Year                     = {2019},
  Address                  = {Seattle, WA},
  Month                    = {October}
}