Benchmarking water turbidity effect on tracking algorithms **This work was partly supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant DPI2014-57746-C3 (MERBOTS Project), by Universitat Jaume I grant PID2010-12 and PhD grants PREDOC/2012/47 and PREDOC/2013/46, by Generalitat Valen-ciana PhD grant ACIF/2014/298 and PROMETEO/2016/066 grant.

Field experiments in underwater robotics research require a big amount of resources in order to be able to test the system in sea conditions. Moreover, sea conditions are constantly changing making impossible to reproduce specific situations. For these reasons, testing, comparing and evaluating different algorithms in similar conditions is an utopic situation. In order to deal with this, a framework that mixes real experiments and a simulated environment is proposed to allow objective comparison of algorithms in an scenario as close as possible to field experiments. This is possible using real sensors in a controllable environment, for instance a water tank, adding simulated hostile conditions difficult to reproduce in a controlled environment such as water turbidity, composing a Hardware In the Loop (HIL) framework. This framework is formed by UWSim, an underwater simulator, and a benchmarking module able to measure the performance of external software. This setup is used in a search and recovery use case to compare different tracking algorithms, predicting the effect of water turbidity in them. The results allow to choose the best option without the need of dealing with field experiments.