From May 19th to 24th, Hayat Rajani and Valerio Franchi participated at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, held in Atlanta, USA.
Hayat, alongside Michele Grimaldi (former research intern at CIRS and currently PhD student at Heriot-Watt University), presented the paper titled “Stonefish: Supporting Machine Learning Research in Marine Robotics”. The work, co-authored with members of our research group Patryk Cieslak, Eduardo Ochoa, and Nuno Gracias, was accepted to the main conference proceedings. It showcases recent enhancements to the Stonefish simulator and reinforces its position as a leading tool for research in marine robotics, consistently offering significantly greater capabilities than existing alternatives.
Hayat and Valerio were also part of the organizing committee of a workshop titled “AQ²UASIM: Advancing Quantitative and QUAlitative SIMulators for marine applications”, led by Michele. The aim of the workshop was to highlight the role of simulators in lowering the high entry barrier to underwater robotics and to foster dialogue around future directions for improving the realism, accessibility, and benchmarking capabilities of these tools to better meet the evolving needs of industry and academia. The workshop attracted strong interest from the community, drawing over 90 participants and featuring 25 accepted poster presentations.
Building on the panel discussions and community feedback, an initiative was undertaken to host a public GitHub repository to curate and disseminate a comprehensive collection of openly available underwater simulation platforms and datasets. This resource is intended to support research and foster collaboration across the underwater robotics community. The repository remains open to contributions, encouraging researchers to populate it with resources, tools, and datasets relevant to the field.
