Gazebo Fluids: SPH-based simulation of fluid interaction with articulated rigid body dynamics

Physical simulation is an indispensable component of robotics simulation platforms that serves as the basis for a plethora of research directions. Looking strictly at robotics, the common characteristic of the most popular physics engines, such as ODE, DART, MuJoCo, bullet, SimBody, PhysX or RaiSim, is that they focus on the solution of articulated rigid bodies with collisions and contacts problems, while paying less attention to other physical phenomena. This restriction limits the range of addressable simulation problems, rendering applications such as soft robotics, cloth simulation, simulation of viscoelastic materials, and fluid dynamics, especially surface swimming, infeasible. In this work, we present Gazebo Fluids, an open-source extension of the popular Gazebo robotics simulator that enables the interaction of articulated rigid body dynamics with particle-based fluid and deformable solid simulation. We implement fluid dynamics and highly viscous and elastic material simulation capabilities based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. We demonstrate the practical impact of this extension for previously infeasible application scenarios in a series of experiments, showcasing one of the first self-propelled robot swimming simulations with SPH in a robotics simulator.