We are happy to invite you to our workshop AQ²UASIM: Advancing Quantitative and QUAlitative SIMulators for marine applications, to be held at IROS 2026.

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 underwater robotics 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. This workshop is planned to be in-person mode. Our wokshop has two submission deadlines:

1st Round: Submission Deadline: 10/07/2026

Notifications: 20/07/2026

2nd Round: Submission Deadline: 20/07/2026

Notifications: 30/07/2026

Workshop: TBD

Both deadlines are identical. If you submit a paper on deadline 1 or deadline 2, we will treat it the same way. We split our submission into two deadlines mostly thinking of people that needed to secure a visa and need to make travel arrangements with time. That way they could apply to the first deadline early on, get notification on their paper and apply to the visa with sufficient time.

Relevant 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