  We present DAVE Aquatic Virtual Environment (DAVE), an open source simulation
stack for underwater robots, sensors, and environments. Conventional robotics
simulators are not designed to address unique challenges that come with the
marine environment, including but not limited to environment conditions that
vary spatially and temporally, impaired or challenging perception, and the
unavailability of data in a generally unexplored environment. Given the variety
of sensors and platforms, wheels are often reinvented for specific use cases
that inevitably resist wider adoption.
  Building on existing simulators, we provide a framework to help speed up the
development and evaluation of algorithms that would otherwise require expensive
and time-consuming operations at sea. The framework includes basic building
blocks (e.g., new vehicles, water-tracking Doppler Velocity Logger,
physics-based multibeam sonar) as well as development tools (e.g., dynamic
bathymetry spawning, ocean currents), which allows the user to focus on
methodology rather than software infrastructure. We demonstrate usage through
example scenarios, bathymetric data import, user interfaces for data inspection
and motion planning for manipulation, and visualizations.
