In this task, the vehicle will track a moving underwater acoustic beacon while avoiding obstacles.

ros2 launch vrx_gz competition.launch.py world:=acoustic_tracking_task

• The acoustic beacon advertises the range, bearing and elevation from the WAM-V. Subscribe to its topic (given as a ros_gz_interfaces::msg:: ParamVec message) via:

ros2 topic echo /wamv/pingers/pinger/range_bearing

• For the timeout counter and your current score, subscribe to the /vrx/task/info topic:

ros2 topic echo /vrx/task/info

• In order to complete the task, you can manually drive the WAM-V to follow the beacon's path with a gamepad:

ros2 launch vrx_gz usv_joy_teleop.launch

The goal pose at every timestep is calculated as the vertical projection from the acoustic beacon to the surface of the water. Your score is incremented based on the distance between the WAM-V and the current goal pose - which will move, as the the beacon is moving. Collisions with obstacles will result in a score penalty.