Low-Fidelity Radar Implementation for Real-Time Ship Manoeuvring Simulator with Unity3D

ABSTRACT: Because of the importance of maintaining safety at sea, great training efforts are required to ensure that operators act safely in any ship. In such context, ship manoeuvring simulators are used to ease operators' learning experience. On the one hand, it may assist in the education of new operators by simulating equipment interfaces in a controlled and predictable scenario; on the other hand, it may simulate non-conventional scenarios to train advanced operators under stresses. As modelling spurious phenomena that yields marine equipment malfunctions is significantly complex, low-fidelity solutions have been proposed to the task. Likewise, the current work is concerned with the development of a low-fidelity radar module to train experienced operators under non-typical conditions. Particularly, this paper describes the radar implementation from the TPN-USP Manoeuvring Simulation Center and presents how simple additional effects may be modelled with considerable simplifications to ensure real-time performance. The implementation may be replicated in any ship manoeuvring simulator based on the game engine Unity3D.

KEYWORDS: Maritime Education and Training (MET), Navigational Simulator, Virtual Reality (VR), Marine Simulators, Radar Simulation, Virtual Reality Training Simulators, Ship Manoeuvring Simulators, Full Mission Bridge Simulators

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Citation note:

Leite B., Pereira Jr. M., Szilagyi E., Tannuri E.A.: Low-Fidelity Radar Implementation for Real-Time Ship Manoeuvring Simulator with Unity3D. TransNav, the International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea Transportation, Vol. 17, No. 4, doi:10.12716/1001.17.04.21, pp. 945-951, 2023

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