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 projects each cover part of the problem and federated one-off support 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.
The workshop is a working session, not a lecture series, and the afternoon is short. These are the documents that let us spend it on priorities rather than on terminology. The two markdown documents are living drafts in the public repository — comments and pull requests are welcome before the event.
Markdown · GitHub
How the organizing committee is framing the discussion: a working definition and bounding box for “maritime robotic simulation,” the three axes that separate it from its neighbors, and a common framework for describing and comparing projects.
Markdown · GitHub
What happens after the workshop. The joint OCEANS × AQUASIM process that turns the discussion into published community guidance, including the roles — section owners, reviewers, moderators — that participants can volunteer for on the day.
The accepted proposal: our goals for the event and for the community, and the argument for why this conversation belongs at OCEANS 2026.
| Presenter | Affiliation | Project · Framework |
|---|---|---|
| Marc S. | Office of Naval Research | Keynote |
| Joshua M. | Brigham Young University | HoloOcean Unreal Engine |
| Ivan S. | KTH Royal Institute of Technology | SMaRC Unity |
| Evan P. | Oregon State University | LRAUV, WEC-Sim, VRX, DAVE, etc. Gazebo |
| Onur B. | University of Michigan | OceanSim Isaac Sim |
| Eric G. | Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division | NATS |
| Hayat R. | Universitat de Girona | Stonefish OpenGL recorded video |
Monday, 21 September 2026 · 1330–1730 PDT · Portola Hotel & Spa, Monterey · Room TBA
| Welcome, Framing and Keynote Introduction Keynote by Marc S. (ONR). |
35 min |
| Project Highlight Talks 6-minute talks per project, following the provided format and questions. |
60 min |
| Break | 15 min |
| Breakout Discussions Moderated small group discussions on specific topics. |
90 min |
| Summary and Next Steps Report-back, the handoff to AQUASIM, and the whitepaper process. |
20 min |
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.