English

A Preview of HoloOcean 2.0

Robotics 2025-10-08 v1

Abstract

Marine robotics simulators play a fundamental role in the development of marine robotic systems. With increased focus on the marine robotics field in recent years, there has been significant interest in developing higher fidelitysimulation of marine sensors, physics, and visual rendering capabilities to support autonomous marine robot development and validation. HoloOcean 2.0, the next major release of HoloOcean, brings state-of-the-art features under a general marine simulator capable of supporting a variety of tasks. New features in HoloOcean 2.0 include migration to Unreal Engine (UE) 5.3, advanced vehicle dynamics using models from Fossen, and support for ROS2 using a custom bridge. Additional features are currently in development, including significantly more efficient ray tracing-based sidescan, forward-looking, and bathymetric sonar implementations; semantic sensors; environment generation tools; volumetric environmental effects; and realistic waves.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.06160,
  title  = {A Preview of HoloOcean 2.0},
  author = {Blake Romrell and Abigail Austin and Braden Meyers and Ryan Anderson and Carter Noh and Joshua G. Mangelson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.06160},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 pages, 9 figures, submitted to the ICRA 2025 aq2uasim workshop

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:21:59.517Z