LEVIATHANDocumentation

DOC 01GETTING STARTED

Application and workspaces

LEVIATHAN opens on five workspaces, selected from the tab bar below the menu: Code, Viewport, Dashboard, Hardware and Hull. Each one shares the same simulation service and the same vehicle and scene state. Earlier top-level areas, such as Simulate, Train, Evaluate, Sensors and Interfaces, now live as Dashboard panels or Viewport menus.

Table 1.1 The five workspaces at a glance.
WorkspaceUse it toDetail
CodeEdit project files, run commands in a terminal, work with language toolingBelow
ViewportBuild and watch the 3D scene: vehicle, structures, water, sensors and overlays; capture ground-truth camera framesBelow, First simulation
DashboardOpen analysis panels for sensors, physics, charts, estimation, evaluation and interfacesDashboard
HardwareWire an electronics harness, generate firmware projects, run firmware on an emulated microcontrollerHardware, HIL and interfaces
HullAnalyse hull fouling, its fuel and carbon cost, and plan crawler cleaning and inspectionHull

Viewport

The Viewport is the 3D view of the simulation. A vehicle runs live in the selected scene, a telemetry readout in the top left shows depth, altitude, heading and speed, and the Stage dock on the right lists everything in the scene.

Viewport workspace: toolbar with Shaded, Perspective, Frame, Vehicle, Scene, Sensors, Overlays and Simulate menus above a 3D view of a vehicle beside a wreck; Stage tree and Property panel on the right.
Figure 1.1 The Viewport. Across the top: display mode, camera view, Frame (centre on the vehicle), and the Vehicle, Scene, Sensors, Overlays and Simulate menus. The Stage dock lists lights, the robot, the water surface and the seabed.
Table 1.2 Viewport toolbar menus.
MenuContents
VehicleChoose one of nine built-in vehicles; upload a CAD model (.glb, .gltf, .obj, .stl, .dae); import URDF, SDFormat or MJCF
SceneOcean preset (the nine built-in scenes), turbidity, sea state, current speed and heading; OpenUSD open and export
SensorsToggle DVL, Sonar, Camera, LiDAR, Bathy, USBL, LBL, GPS, IMU, Depth, Compass, CTD and ADCP; the Camera section holds the PerceptionFrame capture controls
OverlaysGrid, Current, Velocity, Thrust, Buoyancy, Axes, Tether, Arm, Acoustic, Reef footprint
SimulateControl mode (Station-keep, Transit, Dive, Rollout), multi-vehicle Fleet and Formation runs, and a buoyancy-driven Glide profile
The Scene menu open: an ocean preset selector, turbidity and sea-state sliders, current speed and heading, and OpenUSD Open and Export buttons.
Figure 1.2 Scene menu: preset, water and current.
The Sensors menu open: a grid of toggles for DVL, Sonar, Camera, LiDAR, Bathy, USBL, LBL, GPS, IMU, Depth, Compass, CTD and ADCP.
Figure 1.3 Sensors menu: the thirteen payload toggles.

The left tool strip holds Select, Move, Rotate and Scale for objects in the scene, snapping, and play controls. Camera views are Perspective, Top, Front and Side, in Shaded or Wireframe display. A toolbar button saves a PNG of the view.

The Viewport is where the rest of LEVIATHAN becomes visible. A canonical World can be shown in it live (Show in Viewport in the Dashboard's World panel). Episodes from the learning panels and recorded trajectories from Replay play back in it. Its camera section captures scientific PerceptionFrames from the current pose, and its vehicle state drives the Dashboard's live panels.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is a tabbed workspace of analysis panels, 85 in all, grouped by subject and opened from + Panel. Panels follow a data source, by default the live Viewport, and share a playback timeline at the bottom with events, layouts and recordings.

Dashboard workspace showing the Grade suite panel: a table of control tasks with PASS, PARTIAL and FAIL status, success rate, standard deviation and a coloured stage-mix bar for each task.
Figure 1.4 The Dashboard with the Grade suite panel. Each task is run over five seeds and given a verdict and a breakdown of how its episodes ended.

The tools that used to have their own tabs are panels here: ROS 2, SITL / HIL, Replay, Author, Scenario graph and Project, together with the former simulation, training, evaluation and sensor views. See Dashboard for the panel catalogue.

Hardware

The Hardware workspace is an electronics bench. Pick a board, place sensors and actuators from the parts library, wire them on a canvas, and check the harness for conflicts. Then generate a PlatformIO project and run compiled RP2040 firmware against simulated sensors.

Hardware workspace, Board tab: a parts library on the left listing microcontrollers and sensors, and a wiring canvas with a Raspberry Pi Pico connected to a depth sensor, temperature sensor, IMU, echosounder, leak sensor and eight thrusters.
Figure 1.5 A BlueROV2 Heavy sensor and thruster bench on a Raspberry Pi Pico. Board, Wiring, Devices, Firmware and Run are the five tabs.

See Hardware, HIL and interfaces.

Hull

The Hull workspace evaluates a ship's hull as a working surface. It follows six steps: Hull, Voyage, Coating, Performance, Robots and Inspection. The workspace covers how fouling grows along a trading pattern, what it costs in power, fuel and carbon, and how a fleet of hull-cleaning crawlers would clean and inspect it.

Hull workspace: a cargo ship in 3D with a fouled underwater hull, cost indicators across the top, ship dimensions and hydrostatics on the right, and a voyage timeline with penalty and cost curves at the bottom.
Figure 1.6 The Hull workspace on day 45 of a trading pattern, with power penalty, extra fuel, extra CO2 and cost per day across the top and the voyage timeline below.

See Hull.

Code

The Code workspace is where you write the software that runs on, or against, your robot: autonomy, perception, training scripts and firmware. It has a file explorer, tabbed editing with diagnostics, quick fixes and formatting, a command palette, go-to-file, search, and integrated terminals.

  • Projects. Open an existing folder as a project, or create a managed project and upload files into it. Every file operation is confined to the project's root folder. LEVIATHAN keeps only a small registry of projects; the folder remains the source of truth.
  • Terminals. Real shell sessions in the project, streamed to the editor, with a choice of shell.
  • Language tooling. Language servers for Python (pylsp, with ruff diagnostics), C and C++ (clangd, using the project's compile commands), CMake and YAML, when they are installed on the machine.
  • Running a project. A project can declare a run command or a training entry point. The Dashboard's Training runs panel launches it as a local process, submits it to a Slurm cluster, or produces the job script as a dry run, then follows its metrics and checkpoints.
Code workspace welcome tab: Start actions for New File, New Folder, Go to File, Command Palette and Open Folder, and a list of keyboard shortcuts.
Figure 1.7 The Code workspace's welcome tab, with its start actions and keyboard shortcuts.
Table 1.3 Code workspace shortcuts.
KeysAction
Ctrl+PGo to file
Ctrl+Shift+PCommand palette
Ctrl+SFormat and save
Ctrl+Shift+FFormat document
Ctrl+.Quick fix on a diagnostic