Underwater robotics is a less developed field due to high entry barriers, including the need for costly equipment and specialized facilities such as pools or access to seas and lakes for testing. These factors make engaging in this area difficult for many research institutions. With this workshop, we aim to familiarize participants with existing simulators and explore areas for future research and development to enhance these tools, ensuring they better meet the evolving needs of industry and academia. Furthermore, we aim to highlight the role of simulation systems in overcoming these challenges, enabling researchers and industry leaders to design, test, and optimize control strategies, autonomy and software architectures in a cost-effective, risk-free environment. By advocating for the use of realistic, open-source simulators, we aim to lower these barriers, allowing more institutions to participate in underwater robotics research

Submission Guidelines

We invite researchers to submit work that advances marine robotics, underwater applications, and realistic simulation environments. While our main focus is on simulation, we also welcome contributions that inform or enhance simulation development—especially those that help bridge the gap between simulation and real-world performance. Authors are encouraged to describe their research pipelines, including how and where their methods are tested (e.g., in simulation, field trials, or hybrid approaches), and to demonstrate relevance to practical marine or underwater applications.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Practical solutions for ocean exploration, aquaculture, or environmental projects
• Underwater manipulation and intervention- Sonar, computer vision, and hybrid sensing technologies
• SLAM and navigation strategies for marine environments
• Artificial intelligence or machine learning to reduce the sim-to-real gap
• Novel simulation techniques for underwater robotics (e.g., multibody dynamics, fluid-structure interactions)
• Open-source datasets, tools, and frameworks for marine robotics

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to ignacio.carlucho@hw.ac.uk