POSIM — Platform for Ocean Simulation

POSIM is an open-source maritime robotics simulation library maintained by IOES-Lab. It brings together ocean worlds, underwater vehicles, sensors, and manipulation tasks for ROS 2 and Gazebo.

POSIM continues the DAVE codebase, originally developed as Project DAVE. This repository preserves the source history, existing copyright notices, and Apache-2.0 license. See origin and compatibility.

Current development version

The main branch targets Ubuntu 26.04, ROS 2 Lyrical, and Gazebo Jetty. The initial POSIM import is based on DAVE ros2 commit 8a3f6ab. POSIM 1.0 has not been released.

Existing ROS package names and launch commands remain available. For example, the demonstration package is still called dave_demos. The initial import contains the CUDA sonar implementation; the WGPU work in DAVE PR #44 is not included in main. Without a CUDA toolkit, the CUDA-specific sonar targets are skipped during configuration. A successful build on ARM64 therefore does not establish sonar availability.

Get started

1. Follow the Ubuntu installation guide, or build a Docker image from this checkout.

2. Open a terminal with the installed ROS and workspace environments loaded.

3. Start a world:

   ros2 launch dave_demos dave_world.launch.py world_name:=dave_ocean_waves

For a server-only run, append headless:=true. On a desktop with rendering available, start REXROV with:

ros2 launch dave_demos dave_robot.launch.py \
  namespace:=rexrov world_name:=dave_ocean_waves z:=-5 paused:=false

World and model references may download assets from Gazebo Fuel on first use. More examples are in the demo guide.

Library contents

• models/: world, vehicle, sensor, and object descriptions and their resources.
• gazebo/: model, sensor, world, ROS bridge, and multibeam sonar plugins.
• examples/dave_demos/: world, robot, sensor, and object launch entry points.
• dave_interfaces/: ROS messages and services used by the library.
• extras/: dependency installation, repository manifests, and development tools.

The legacy DAVE Wiki remains available for background material. Follow this repository's installation instructions for POSIM; the legacy Wiki is not a POSIM release manual.

Contributing

Open issues and pull requests in IOES-Lab/POSIM. Include the source revision, operating system, architecture, launch command, and relevant logs when reporting a problem. Install and run the repository's pre-commit hooks before submitting changes:

python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/posim-dev
source ~/.venvs/posim-dev/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install
pre-commit run --all-files

Maintainers should read CI and image configuration before enabling Docker builds or publication in this new repository.

License

Apache License 2.0. Existing third-party notices remain with their source files and assets.