WasserMan: 10 underwater robot manipulation tasks in Isaac Sim (open source)

[dancher00]

We built WasserMan, an open-source benchmark for underwater vehicle–arm manipulation in Isaac Sim.

The 10 tasks include turning valves, opening hatches, inserting a hotstab and recovering objects. The simulation includes currents, buoyancy, thruster response and underwater camera effects. We use BlueROV2 Heavy + Alpha 5 and RexROV2 + Oberon7, with an additional bimanual valve study.

We evaluate ACT, Diffusion Policy and chunked BC on six tasks, and SmolVLA on three. The task demos on the website show scripted experts in simulation; learned-policy results are reported separately.

The open core runs with procedural arm geometry. Setup requires native Linux, Python 3.12, a compatible NVIDIA GPU/driver and Isaac Sim 6.1; the README has installation and first-run commands.

• Code: https://github.com/dancher00/wasserman
• Videos and documentation: https://dancher00.github.io/wasserman/
• Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04536

I'm one of the authors. If you try it, I'd love to hear what breaks or what underwater tasks you'd add.

[vick-yu]

This is fantastic -- thank you for sharing it here!

@dancher00 -- good luck with the RA-L submission, and please do report back here
if you hit any Isaac Sim-specific friction that we can help with.

[vick-yu]

Closing this out for now -- feel free to reopen or start a new discussion if you hit any Isaac Sim-specific issues with WasserMan, or if there is anything we can help with for the RA-L submission. Good luck!