Interfacing the Coda and Cadcon Simulators: a Multi-fidelity Simulation Testbed for Autonomous Oceanographic Sampling Networks

Simulation testbeds are important for developing complex systems, such as autonomous oceanographic sampling networks (AOSNs), as they allow the development and testing of control mechanisms without incurring the cost or risk of using real vehicles. Over the past several years, two simulators for AOSNs, CoDA and CADCON, have been developed. The CoDA simulator is a multi-fidelity simulation testbed for the intelligent AOSN control mechanisms being developed at the University of Maine. While it can simulate AOSNs at a range of fidelities, it lacks truly high-fidelity simulation of the environment and of vehicle dynamics. CADCON is a high-fidelity multi-AUV simulation testbed developed at the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute. This paper reports on work done to combine the two simulators into the CoDA/CADCON simulator, which is capable of a range of AOSN simulations, from faster-than-real-time simulations of aggregate AOSN control mechanism properties to high-fidelity, real-time simulations of an AOSN as it carries out missions.