Open Robotics and Google Summer of Code 2024

We at Open Robotics are pleased to participate in another year of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project! We believe that mentorship and collaboration are crucial to our mission, and we are pleased to introduce this year’s contributors and mentors.

This year, five contributors are working on three different projects to improve aspects of Gazebo.

• Rakesh Vivekanandan, Helena Moyan, and Gaurav Kumar will work with Woensug Choi and Mabel Zhang on physics-based sonar simulation for underwater robots.

• Saurabh Kamat will work with Jose Luis Rivero to improve how users install Gazebo.

• Yaswanth Gonna will help Steve Peters develop an improved set of worlds for benchmarking physics engines.

Enhancing physics-based sonar simulation for underwater robotics

The contributors to this project will further improve the physics-based multibeam sonar simulation plugin within the DAVE (Dave Aquatic Virtual Environment) project. DAVE, initiated by the Naval Postgraduate School, is a collaborative effort that shares its codebase with the Virtual RobotX (VRX) platform. The primary goal of DAVE is to provide a robust simulation environment for rapid testing and evaluation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs/UUVs) in missions involving autonomous manipulation.

This year's project focuses on migrating and enhancing the existing physics-based sonar simulation plugin to work with the ROS 2 framework and Gazebo Harmonic. The students will adapt the simulation to function within these new environments while maintaining the integrity of the example cases. Potential improvements include increasing refresh rates and expanding the simulation to support additional sonar types, such as side-scan and mechanical scanning sonar. This project draws inspiration from recent advancements in underwater sonar simulation that employed an acoustic scattering model and GPU-accelerated CUDA computations to achieve physically accurate sonar imagery at practical refresh rates for robotics simulation. The improved sonar simulation will enable researchers and students to more accurately test and validate their autonomous underwater vehicle algorithms and solutions before deploying them in real-world scenarios.

Woensug Choi, an assistant professor at Korea Maritime & Ocean University, is mentoring this project. Mabel Zhang of Heriot-Watt University’s Orkney campus is also assisting with mentoring.

Rakesh Vivekanandan

Rakesh, a graduate student at Oregon State University, will spend his summer contributing to migrating and enhancing the physics-based sonar simulation plugin to work with the latest distributions of ROS 2 and the Gazebo simulator.

This summer, Rakesh plans to contribute to the GSoC project by collaborating with his mentor and fellow contributors to enhance the capabilities of the physics-based sonar simulator plugin. He intends to validate these enhancements using real-world data collected from a BlueROV2 equipped with an Oculus imaging sonar sensor. Rakesh believes that this plugin will significantly advance underwater robotics research, allowing for more accurate testing and validation of autonomous underwater vehicle algorithms in simulators before real-world deployments.

Rakesh is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Robotics at Oregon State University, where he focuses on advancing the autonomy of underwater vehicles in dynamic marine environments. His research encompasses developing capabilities for autonomous underwater docking, integrating wave and current models into control frameworks, and enabling real-time 3D reconstruction of free-floating objects to improve obstacle avoidance strategies. Overall, his research interests lie at the intersection of perception, motion planning, and control.

Helena Moyen

Helena, a student at the University of São Paulo, will be dedicating this summer to enhancing physics-based sonar simulations in Gazebo.

Helena will be working alongside her mentor Woensug Choi and GSoC colleagues Gaurav and Rakesh to migrate the sonar plugin to the latest ROS 2 and Gazebo framework. Helena recognizes the significance of maintaining the DAVE environment as Gazebo Classic and ROS Noetic approach end of life. She believes this project holds a high value for the open-source community.

Helena is a third-year Computer Engineering student at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with a passion for robotics and software development. Since joining the university, she has been an active member of Skyrats, a student team focused on developing autonomous drones. Through this involvement, Helena has gained practical experience with technologies such as ROS, ArduPilot and Gazebo, which sparked her desire to contribute to open-source projects. Her enthusiasm for robotics extends to participating in competitions and conducting tutorials and workshops to help other students enhance their knowledge and skills in this field.

Gaurav Kumar

Gaurav, a student from VJTI in Mumbai, is spending the summer enhancing physics-based sonar simulations in Gazebo.

During this year’s GSoC, Gaurav will be helping to migrate and improve the physics-based multibeam sonar simulation plugin within the DAVE (Dave Aquatic Virtual Environment) project. The project will also aim to implement half-precision calculations using CUDA for increased refresh rates and expand the simulation to support additional sonar types.
Gaurav is a final-year B.Tech student at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) in Mumbai, India. He’s passionate about robotics, computer science, and control systems. He has been involved with robotics right from the first year of college and has conducted various robotics workshops and hackathons for junior students at VJTI. He has participated in various robotics competitions and has completed an internship at the Robotics Research Center at IIIT-Hyderabad, where he worked on optimal trajectory generation and path following using a Holonomic drive robot.

Effortless Gazebo installations

This project aims to provide a variety of new mechanisms to use a pre-installed, pre-configured copy of Gazebo. This will help users enjoy a simpler experience when running the simulator, without the need to deal with dependencies or managing the matching of compatible Gazebo and ROS versions, platform versions, and other aspects related to the deployment of Gazebo in a desired configuration. With these enhancements, Gazebo will be easier than ever to use in student labs, conference tutorials and workshops, automated testing systems, and a range of other contexts.

This project is being mentored by Jose Luis Rivero. Jose has been working with the Open Source Robotics Foundation for more than 10 years. He is a long-term, frequent contributor to both infrastructure for the Gazebo simulator and for a wide range of aspects of ROS.

Saurabh Kamat

Saurabh, a Masters student at the National University of Singapore, will be implementing new mechanisms for deploying Gazebo simulations.

As part of this year's GSoC, Saurabh will be working with his mentor, Jose Luis Rivero, to implement a variety of new mechanisms to provide a pre-installed version of Gazebo. This will help users enjoy a streamlined developer experience when running the simulator without the concern of ROS-Gazebo version mismatch or need to deal with the dependency chain.

Saurabh is currently pursuing a Master of Science degree in Robotics at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Through his degree, Saurabh aims to focus on robot navigation and multi-agent path finding as his primary research areas. Before joining NUS, Saurabh worked at Wipro’s Lab45 Innovation Center in Bengaluru, India as a Robotics Software Engineer. At Lab45, he worked with ROS 2 and Open-RMF for two years to develop software solutions to solve industry problems, contributing to projects in autonomous systems, intelligent robotics and multi-agent coordination.

Benchmarking physics engines

A wide variety of robotics applications rely on suitable simulator performance. While many combinations of open-source simulator and physics engine are available, each with its benefits and drawbacks, there is a lack of simulator-agnostic benchmarks to help developers and users compare and choose the right simulator-physics engine pairing for their specific use case. This GSoC project will introduce a small number of simple benchmarking worlds to compare various physics engines. The comparisons will be based on metrics such as computational time and numerical accuracy. Benchmarking will be performed with Gazebo, and a set of functionalities, such as logging and world generation, will be developed to allow for easy integration with other simulators and adding of new worlds.

Yaswanth Gonna

Yaswant, a student at NIT in India, will be developing a physics engine benchmarking suite and infrastructure.

Yaswanth will be working with his mentor on benchmarking physics engines. He will initially build upon the existing benchmarking repository to perform benchmarking with Gazebo, then develop a simulator-agnostic infrastructure that will allow developers of other simulators and the broader open-source community to easily adopt and expand the benchmark suite by adding their own tests.

Yaswanth is a senior-year chemical engineering student at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (NIT), Nagpur, India. His primary interest lies in robot dynamics, control, and motion planning. He was previously a part of the student-run lab IvLabs where he worked on legged and aerial robots. He has extensively utilized Gazebo and ROS while working on his internship project, which inspired him to contribute to open source. He enjoys watching anime and exploring other areas of robotics in his spare time.