A Framework for Model Sailing Simulation in Gazebo

Recently there has been increased demand in wind power usage in maritime transportation. At the same time, due to numerous advances, interest in autonomous mobile platforms is at its all-time peak. The utilization of green Unmanned Surface Vehicle fleets could provide enormous benefits in research, security and transportation. The development of autonomous sailing vehicles can be greatly assisted with the usage of simulation where the control, planning and navigation systems can be tested and implemented. Furthermore, great synergy can be achieved through integration of software systems of such platforms with existing popular robotic frameworks, such as ROS. In this paper we propose a flexible ROS-based framework for simulation of customizable sailing vessels, focusing on small scale models.