State of Practice and a Community Roadmap
For ground and aerial autonomy, simulation is part of the daily development cycle, and tools such as CARLA, AirSim, and Isaac Sim are now common ground across research groups, vendors, and program offices. Ocean robotics has the same need. Surface, underwater, and maritime aerial systems must be tested across distances, durations, and weather and sea states that on-water trials cannot reach, and the same simulators are increasingly asked to produce synthetic data for machine-learning perception pipelines.
The current state of practice in ocean simulation is fragmented. Several open-source projects each cover part of the problem, but no single project today plays the role that CARLA or AirSim play for the driving and aerial communities, and federated one-off funding for individual simulators has slowed convergence. OCEANS 2026 in Monterey gathers the academic, naval, industrial, and ocean-instrumentation groups whose combined needs define what an ocean simulator has to be, which makes it the right venue for this conversation.
| Registration opening | TBA · via OCEANS 2026 registration (placeholder) |
| Monday, 21 September 2026 | Workshop day at OCEANS 2026 Monterey |
Additional dates (e.g. registration deadline) will be added once confirmed.
The program features one invited speaker per active project, paired across Gazebo-based and game-engine-based stacks. Speakers will be announced here as they are confirmed.
Virtual RobotX
Speaker TBA
DAVE Aquatic Virtual Environment
Speaker TBA
Long-Range AUV simulation
Speaker TBA
Unreal Engine
Speaker TBA
NVIDIA Isaac Sim
Speaker TBA
Standalone simulator; hydrodynamics verification reference
Speaker TBA
A practitioner talk from an ocean-autonomy program that uses simulation in production is also planned.
Half day: about 3.5 hours plus a 30-minute coffee break. Times are relative to the start.
| 00:00–00:15 | Welcome. Scope of "multi-domain ocean sim" and the working inclusion criteria. |
| 00:15–01:30 | State of the art and state of practice. Short invited talks (12–15 min) from one representative per active project, paired across Gazebo-based and game-engine-based stacks. |
| 01:30–02:00 | Coffee break and informal discussion. |
| 02:00–02:45 | Synthetic data and ML training panel. How each stack handles vectorized environments and perception-data generation, with a moderated comparison. |
| 02:45–03:30 | Roadmap working session. Breakouts on (i) fidelity gaps, (ii) tooling and CI, (iii) funding model and governance. |
| 03:30–03:45 | Close. Assignment of section editors for the post-workshop white paper. |
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA
Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School working on marine robotics, autonomy, and the simulation tools that support both. His current focus is on what fidelity is actually needed for ocean simulation to serve as a daily tool for autonomy development.
Office of Naval Research (ONR), Arlington, VA, USA
ONR Autonomy Focus Area Lead, leading a team of Program Officers defining the roadmap for autonomy development. As a Program Officer in the Advanced Naval Platforms Division (331) she manages multiple maritime-autonomy programs. She brings a funding-agency perspective on shared infrastructure for marine autonomy and how it should be sustained.
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU, where he founded and directs the Field Robotic Systems (FRoSt) Lab. The lab develops and maintains HoloOcean, an Unreal-Engine-based marine robotics simulator. He received his PhD and MS in Robotics from the University of Michigan.
Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
Robotics Ph.D. student studying the intersection of geometric methods and machine learning for underwater vehicles, leveraging marine robotics simulation to bridge theory and field deployment. He is a former co-organizer of the ROS Maritime Community Group.
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Associate Professor in Naval Architecture at KTH. His work spans marine robotics, underwater vehicle design, modelling, manoeuvring, navigation, and simulation-supported autonomy. Since initiating the Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre (SMaRC) in 2017, he has pushed simulated environments as a practical tool for underwater robotics development.
Anduril Industries, Boston, MA, USA
Former core developer and maintainer of ROS 2 and Gazebo at the Open Source Robotics Foundation (2019–2024), collaborating with marine simulators including DAVE, VRX, the MBARI Long-Range AUV simulator, and the MBARI Wave Energy Converter simulator. She now works on safety-critical software certification for AUVs.
Additional organizers are being recruited through the public repository before the camera-ready submission.