Irrlicht Engine

Hello everybody,
I'm a complete newbie of irrlicht but before I start playing with it I would like to know if it is the right program for my needs.
I would like to develop an underwater rov simulator, or at least something to move a robot and a target into it.
My aim is to simulate the robot's movement, retrieve it's coordinates somehow and send them to a custom build hardware board (to set for example a route) trought canbus or rs232 and then back to irrlicht.
Are irrlich + a physical simulator the right tools I need?
Does something like it already exist?
I tried serching the forum but I didn't find anything.
Many thanks to everybody who will answer.

I think Irrlicht alone would be fine for this, if you get your ROV model with a skeleton in it, you can set the joint angles yourself through the Irrlicht API and animate your model procedurally though your code.

I don't think you would need a physics engine unless you wanted the model to interact with its environment automatically.

I have done some very simple bone animations from FreeBasic with my IrrlichtWrapper to test the concept and they seam to work well.

Irrlicht will be fine for the visualisation part. Whether you need a physics engine depends on whether part of the goal is to model buoyancy, water resistance and other physical effects. If so, then you may want to choose a physics engine and an appropriate dataset first, and then pick a visualisation solution later.

you can try subsim:
http://www.adrianboeing.com/products.html#subsim

Thank you all for your help!
I think I'm going to take a look to subsim first, and in case I will explore the irrlicht world, which seems very fascinating.