RubbleSim: A Photorealistic Structural Collapse Simulator for Confined Space Mapping

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Frost, Constantine, Council, Chad, McGuinness, Margaret, Hanson, Nathaniel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866915571727073280
author Frost, Constantine
Council, Chad
McGuinness, Margaret
Hanson, Nathaniel
author_facet Frost, Constantine
Council, Chad
McGuinness, Margaret
Hanson, Nathaniel
contents Despite well-reported instances of robots being used in disaster response, there is scant published data on the internal composition of the void spaces within structural collapse incidents. Data collected during these incidents is mired in legal constraints, as ownership is often tied to the responding agencies, with little hope of public release for research. While engineered rubble piles are used for training, these sites are also reluctant to release information about their proprietary training grounds. To overcome this access challenge, we present RubbleSim -- an open-source, reconfigurable simulator for photorealistic void space exploration. The design of the simulation assets is directly informed by visits to numerous training rubble sites at differing levels of complexity. The simulator is implemented in Unity with multi-operating system support. The simulation uses a physics-based approach to build stochastic rubble piles, allowing for rapid iteration between simulation worlds while retaining absolute knowledge of the ground truth. Using RubbleSim, we apply a state-of-the-art structure-from-motion algorithm to illustrate how perception performance degrades under challenging visual conditions inside the emulated void spaces. Pre-built binaries and source code to implement are available online: https://github.com/mit-ll/rubble_pile_simulator.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_20529
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RubbleSim: A Photorealistic Structural Collapse Simulator for Confined Space Mapping
Frost, Constantine
Council, Chad
McGuinness, Margaret
Hanson, Nathaniel
Robotics
Despite well-reported instances of robots being used in disaster response, there is scant published data on the internal composition of the void spaces within structural collapse incidents. Data collected during these incidents is mired in legal constraints, as ownership is often tied to the responding agencies, with little hope of public release for research. While engineered rubble piles are used for training, these sites are also reluctant to release information about their proprietary training grounds. To overcome this access challenge, we present RubbleSim -- an open-source, reconfigurable simulator for photorealistic void space exploration. The design of the simulation assets is directly informed by visits to numerous training rubble sites at differing levels of complexity. The simulator is implemented in Unity with multi-operating system support. The simulation uses a physics-based approach to build stochastic rubble piles, allowing for rapid iteration between simulation worlds while retaining absolute knowledge of the ground truth. Using RubbleSim, we apply a state-of-the-art structure-from-motion algorithm to illustrate how perception performance degrades under challenging visual conditions inside the emulated void spaces. Pre-built binaries and source code to implement are available online: https://github.com/mit-ll/rubble_pile_simulator.
title RubbleSim: A Photorealistic Structural Collapse Simulator for Confined Space Mapping
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20529