Underwater vehicle synthetic environment demonstration: an overview

The use of synthetic environments (SE) and network technologies such as the World Wide Web (WWW) enable information from distributed simulations to be integrated, visualised, manipulated and interacted with in near real time in a virtual world. This capability enables underwater system designs and concepts to be comprehensively prototyped, tested, verified and validated in a virtual world before manufacture. These benefits have the potential to reduce overall risks and costs. DERA have been involved in work demonstrating the use of SE in the mine warfare area. An initial demonstration involved the combination of information from UUV 6 degree-of-freedom, seabed terrain, side scan sonar, video and command and control system simulations. This data was combined using the distributed interactive simulation (DIS) protocol to link entity level simulations. A stealth viewer was used to visualise interaction of 3D entity models. The paper discusses the work conducted for this demonstration highlighting the method of implementation, results and likely future work