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Stonefish

  • Software
  • Drones and boats
  • Simulator

A C++ simulation library for marine robotics that pairs a physics engine with a rendering pipeline for underwater, ocean and atmosphere scenes. It can also serve as a general robot simulator.

Source on GitHub: github.com/patrykcieslak/stonefish (opens in a new tab). Facts read at commit b21eb8e (opens in a new tab).

Licenses

Code
GPL-3.0-only (opens in a new tab)

Read by Robotheca from COPYING.txt (opens in a new tab) (GPL-3.0-only) at commit b21eb8e (opens in a new tab), on 16 Oct 2026.

Commercial use
Yes

Copyleft: Modified source must be published.

What it does

  • Physics engine is based on Bullet Physics, extended for realistic simulation of marine robots.
  • Hydrodynamic forces are computed from the actual geometry of bodies rather than symbolic models.
  • Rendering covers atmosphere, ocean and underwater environments, with wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering.
  • Can be used for standalone applications or combined with a ROS package that provides a standard simulator node.
  • Documentation is available as Sphinx HTML and as Doxygen code docs generated from source comments.

Written by Robotheca from the project's README (opens in a new tab) at commit b21eb8e.

Getting started

Difficulty
Advanced
Hardware it needs, as the project states it
The simulation is CPU heavy and requires a recent GPU with support for OpenGL 4.3, using official manufacturer drivers. Developed and tested on Linux Ubuntu; it should work on any Unix-based platform. Windows is not available and MacOS is not supported.

Maintenance

Status
Maintained: a commit in the last 12 months
Newest commit
14 Jul 2026 on master
Latest release
ICRA 2025: Supporting machine learning research in marine robotics (10 Jun 2025)

Checked on GitHub on 16 Oct 2026.

Links

Robots that can run it

No robot on Robotheca is linked to it yet. Links come from a robot's robot.yaml, from its dependency files read as text, or from Robotheca's editors.

Robotheca lists software as a reference: nothing is hosted or run here, and every fact links to where it was read.