An Efficient Acoustic Camera Simulator for Robotic Applications: Design, Implementation, and Validation

As forward-looking imaging sonar, also called an acoustic camera, has emerged as an important sensor for marine robotics applications, its simulators have attracted considerable research attention within the field. This paper presents an acoustic camera simulator that efficiently generates acoustic images using only the depth information of the scene. The simulator approximates the acoustic beam of a real acoustic camera as a set of acoustic rays originating from the center of the acoustic camera. A simplified active sonar model and error models for the acoustic rays are incorporated to account for the environmental factors which can affect the rays. The simulator is implemented in the Gazebo simulator, a robotic simulator, and does not rely on any other components except depth rendering. To evaluate the performance of the developed simulator, qualitative and quantitative comparisons were conducted between simulated images and actual acoustic images obtained in a test tank.