citekey: "grossetLOTUSimEnergyMaritimeSimulatorHumanDroneInteractionAutonomous2026" title: "LOTUSim-Energy: A Maritime Simulator for Human-Drone Interaction in Autonomous Offshore Operation \& Maintenance" authors: ["Juliette Grosset", "Marie Dubromel", "Hélène Lechêne", "Quentin Arzel", "Cédric Buche"] year: 2026 venue: "arXiv" url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17124" doi: "10.48550/arXiv.2609.17124" tags: [paper, embodied-ai, "cs.RO"] status: unread rating: created: 2026-09-16
LOTUSim-Energy: A Maritime Simulator for Human-Drone Interaction in Autonomous Offshore Operation \& Maintenance
Juliette Grosset, Marie Dubromel, Hélène Lechêne, Quentin Arzel, Cédric Buche · 2026 arXiv · PDF
Abstract
Offshore maintenance requires operations in the air, the surface, and the subsea domain and include human supervision. This paper presents LOTUSim-Energy, a real-time maritime simulator designed for multi-domain human--drone interaction for offshore operation and maintenance. The plat- form unifies heterogeneous unmanned vehicles (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: UAVs, Unmanned Surface Vehicles: USVs, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: AUVs, Remotely Operated Vehicles: ROVs) within a distributed architecture coupling environment forcing (wind, waves, currents) and provides immersive user interfaces for supervision (desktop and virtual reality). A structured offshore task library enables repeatable evaluation of autonomy stacks under realistic metocean disturbances. The simulator supports realistic physics, energy-aware battery modeling, and fault-detection pipelines as modular validation tools. System-level performance is demonstrated on a multi-domain inspection scenario for monopile and transition piece structure, where we evaluate the reliability of integrated waypoint-follower plugin and Automatic Identification System (AIS)-referenced trajectory tracking under real-time energy monitoring. By combining unified environmental physics, heterogeneous vehicle simulation, and immersive supervision, LOTUSim-Energy provides an integration testbed for prototyping and rehearsing offshore human--robot collaboration workflows, as a step toward de-risking sea deployment.
TL;DR
Offshore maintenance requires operations in the air, the surface, and the subsea domain and include human supervision. This paper presents LOTUSim-Energy, a real-time maritime simulator designed for multi-domain human--drone interaction for offshore operation and maintenance.