This manual is for advanced user. For instructions on getting started with SubSim refer to the Installation Guide and the Quick Start Guide.
The objective of SubSim is to realistically simulate an autonomous robot in an
underwater environment. The underwater environment will be referred to in
this document as the World, and three-dimensional objects in the
World are called WorldObjects, or simply Objects.
In order to realistically simulate the underwater world, the objects must act
and interact, with their environment in a similar manner to the physical
reactions of real objects. This includes motion and visual
appearance. Virtual sensors must also act like their real counterparts,
so that any processing unit using information from a virtual sensor would not
be able to differentiate the simulated signal from the real signal.
In order to accurately model the motion of objects under the influence of forces and collisions, a 3rd party physics engine called Newton was used. More information about Newton can be found at www.newtondynamics.com.
Sensors, motor, and liquid effects are modeled using the Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) library. More information about PAL can be found at pal.sourceforge.net
OpenGL along with a custom high-level interface is used to render the objects on the computer screen. SubSim currently only supports Milkshape 3D models.
A requirement for the SubSim project is to simulate the execution of compiled code on an embedded system. For SubSim, the embedded controller is used to autonomously control a unmanned underwater vehicle. This requires that the SubSim application accept compiled code from source that has little or no changes from that for the actual embedded system.
The EyeBot controller is developed to be a very versatile robot controller, suitable to build lots of different applications in the context of autonomous mobile robots. It is a 32-bit microcontroller with a variety of I/O capabilities. The Eyebot high-level API is implemented as one plugin. This provides a high-level interface to the sensors on the submarine, as well as driving commands. More information about the Eyebot microcontroller can be found at https://robotics.ee.uwa.edu.au. The Eyebot API is documented here.
This section covers how to create a custom autonomous underwater vehicle that can be simulated with SubSim.
SubSim was designed to be extendable through the use of Plugins. See the Plugins HOWTO for more information on writing and compiling your own Plugin.
A low-level API interface that can be used to implement other microcontroller APIs is available.
See the Low-level HOWTO for more information on using the low-level API.
This section discusses using the command prompt for starting SubSim. By default, the program can be started by typing the following
> subsimD.exe
To see a complete list of command line parameters, use the -h or -help input switch.
> subsimD.exe -h > subsimD.exe -help
If no parameters are passed in, SubSim will load the world from defaultworld.xml. You can specify a simulation file as parameter ans SubSim will load the simulation with all specifications. See the Subsim User Howto for more information about Simulationfiles
> subsimD.exe mySimulation.sub