Underwater AUV manipulation simulatiom

Omniverse Isaac Sim
1

Hi,

I’m pretty new to marine robotics, I have been looking for a simulator for underwater vision guided manipulation and found DAVE but when I checked the camera topic the rgb image is clean, where as the one I saw in stoneFish looked more realistic but the rov/auv available in it doesnt has a manipulator in it.

Has anyone been at similar situation before?I don’t know how or what to do about this situation. I’m looking for any kind of info that’ll help me with my work. Thank you in advance

3

Hi @Korner,

Quick framing that should save you some time: Isaac Sim is not a turnkey underwater simulator — it has no built-in hydrodynamics (buoyancy, added mass, drag, currents). So out of the box it won’t replace DAVE/Stonefish for the fluid dynamics. What it is very strong at is exactly the two gaps you ran into:

  • Photorealistic cameras — the RTX renderer gives far more realistic RGB (materials, lighting, caustic-like effects, sensor noise) than the “clean” image you saw in DAVE, plus domain randomization for vision training.
  • Manipulation — full articulated arms/grippers with contact-rich physics, which is what the Stonefish ROVs were missing.

So the common pattern for underwater vision-guided manipulation in Isaac Sim is:

  1. Import your ROV/AUV + manipulator (URDF/USD) and simulate the arm and contacts natively.
  2. Add the underwater dynamics yourself as external forces each physics step — buoyancy (per-link, from displaced volume), quadratic drag, and added mass — via a small Python/OmniGraph step callback or a force field. It’s a few equations per link; most people start with buoyancy + linear/quadratic drag and refine. NVIDIA Warp is handy for GPU-accelerated custom force fields.
  3. Render the RTX camera for your perception pipeline.

There’s community interest in underwater Isaac Sim but nothing official/turnkey yet, so budget some time for the buoyancy/drag model.

Hope that helps

4

Hello!

We noticed that this topic hasn’t received any recent updates from anyone reporting this issue, so we are closing it for now to help keep the forum organized.

If you are still experiencing this issue or have related questions, please create a GitHub Discussion or Issue in the Isaac Sim repository and include a link to this topic along with updated details. Mentioning or linking to this original topic provides helpful context and makes it easier for others to assist you.

Thank you for being part of the NVIDIA Isaac Sim community.

Best regards,
The NVIDIA Isaac Sim Forum Team