Candidate: Prathmesh Atkale Project: Accelerating Ray-Based Multibeam Sonar with Rust and wgpu

Goal

Port the CUDA-based multibeam sonar pipeline to a vendor-agnostic WebGPU (wgpu + WGSL) backend without changing the underlying physics.

Removes NVIDIA dependency and enables sonar simulation on Intel, AMD, and Apple hardware.

Code

• PoC Repo: https://github.com/Prathmesh2931/sonar_bridge_poc
• WGSL Shaders: https://github.com/Prathmesh2931/sonar_bridge_poc/tree/main/shaders
• FFI Bridge: https://github.com/Prathmesh2931/sonar_bridge_poc/blob/main/src/lib.rs

Core Resources

Physics

• Choi et al. (2021) — multibeam sonar model (Eq. 7, 8, 9, 14, 16, 22)
• Brown et al. (2017) — point scattering model (speckle basis)

Existing Implementation

• Field-Robotics-Lab/nps_uw_multibeam_sonar — original CUDA plugin
• IOES-Lab/dave PR #29 (hmoyen, GSoC 2025) — CUDA acceleration study

GPU + Compute