Marinarium: a New Arena to Bring Maritime Robotics Closer to Shore

2026-02-26

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of achieving consistency across simulation, laboratory, and real-world marine environments in underwater robotics testing. To this end, the authors propose Marinarium—a modular and scalable underwater research facility that integrates multi-domain operational spaces spanning underwater, surface, and aerial domains, features a retractable roof enabling experiments under real weather conditions, and is tightly coupled with the high-fidelity digital twin simulator SMaRCSim and a space robotics laboratory. Marinarium uniquely combines multi-domain coordination, variable meteorological conditions, high-fidelity dynamics modeling, and spacecraft-grade validation capabilities, supporting heterogeneous robot teams and learning-based system identification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning-based underwater system identification, cross-domain rendezvous tasks, the digital twin’s ability to bridge the reality gap, and the feasibility of using underwater agents for spacecraft navigation validation.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Systems under Uncertainty
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search

Abstract

This paper presents the Marinarium, a modular and stand-alone underwater research facility designed to provide a realistic testbed for maritime and space-analog robotic experimentation in a resource-efficient manner. The Marinarium combines a fully instrumented underwater and aerial operational volume, extendable via a retractable roof for real-weather conditions, a digital twin in the SMaRCSim simulator and tight integration with a space robotics laboratory. All of these result from design choices aimed at bridging simulation, laboratory validation, and field conditions. We compare the Marinarium to similar existing infrastructures and illustrate how its design enables a set of experiments in four open research areas within field robotics. First, we exploit high-fidelity dynamics data from the tank to demonstrate the potential of learning-based system identification approaches applied to underwater vehicles. We further highlight the versatility of the multi-domain operating volume via a rendezvous mission with a heterogeneous fleet of robots across underwater, surface, and air. We then illustrate how the presented digital twin can be utilized to reduce the reality gap in underwater simulation. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of underwater surrogates for spacecraft navigation validation by executing spatiotemporally identical inspection tasks on a planar space-robot emulator and a neutrally buoyant \gls{rov}. In this work, by sharing the insights obtained and rationale behind the design and construction of the Marinarium, we hope to provide the field robotics research community with a blueprint for bridging the gap between controlled and real offshore and space robotics experimentation.

Problem

• field robotics
• underwater robotics
• simulation-to-reality gap
• space-analog testing
• robotic validation

Innovation

• Marinarium
• digital twin
• multi-domain robotics
• underwater simulation
• space-analog validation