A complete virtual test environment is a powerful tool for Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) research, and the simulation of ship motion and shipborne sensors is one of the prerequisites for constructing such an environment. This paper proposed a universal simulation framework of shipborne inertial sensors. A ship motion model considering environmental disturbances is proposed to simulate the six-degrees-of-freedom motion of ships. The discrete form of the inertial sensor stochastic error model is derived. The inertial measurement data are simulated by adding artificial errors to a simulated motion status. In addition, the ship motion simulation, inertial measurement simulation, and environment simulation nodes are implemented based on the computational graph architecture of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The benefit from the versatility of the ROS messages, the format of simulated inertial measurement is exactly the same as that of real sensors, which provides a research basis for the fusion perception algorithm based on visual–inertial and laser–inertial sensors in the research field of ASVs.

A ship’s body plan is a vital data resource of ship hydrodynamics analysis, especially for time-domain simulations. Motivated by 3D printing technology, a novel dense body plan generation method is developed in this study. The slicing algorithm is adopted to generate dense 2D body plans from ship stereolithographic models. The dense body plan can be produced automatically under arbitrary rotational angles and slices. Moreover, a section redistribution algorithm is integrated to eliminate the non-uniform distribution features in sliced data inherited from the stereolithographic models. The benchmark ship models are selected to validate the accuracy of the method. The hull volumes of three ship models are calculated based on the produced data. The calculated results show satisfactory agreement with the published values. Furthermore, the estimation formulas of wetted surface area (WSA) are reviewed and utilized for validation. The calculated WSAs by slice integration turn out to be adaptive and accurate. The time costs of different slices are provided to illustrate the computational efficiency. A ship hydrodynamic coefficients database is constructed based on a 2D strip method and the produced data. The proposed method aims to improve the generation process of the body plan, which could meet the accuracy requirements of the strip method. As a result, hydrodynamic coefficients utilized in time-domain simulations could be obtained smoothly from the database.