Summary
Maintaining offshore structures is hard because it involves flying drones, surface vehicles, and underwater robots, all while humans watch over them. The authors made a simulator called LOTUSim-Energy that puts these different vehicles together in one system, with real-world conditions like wind and waves. It also lets users interact through computer screens or virtual reality to practice supervising drone missions. They tested it by simulating inspections on offshore structures using multiple types of drones and tracked energy use and navigation accuracy. This tool helps teams rehearse and improve their plans before sending drones out to sea.
What this means in practice
- •For offshore operation teams: Simulate and rehearse human supervision with diverse drone fleets under realistic sea conditions before real offshore missions.
- •For marine robotics developers: Test and validate autonomy software for multi-domain maritime robots with integrated energy and fault monitoring in simulated environments.
Authors
Juliette Grosset, Marie Dubromel, Hélène Lechêne, Quentin Arzel, Cédric Buche
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.