The SAFE Maritime Autonomous Technology (SAFEMATE) project aims to improve ferry safety by developing a fully automated navigation system that can be relied upon to plot a safe course through busy shipping lanes.
Autonomous vessels are seen as being a likely development in the future but the route to their development is not without challenges. Developing a fully automated navigation system that can be relied upon to plot a safe course through busy shipping lanes remains a major barrier to overcome.
Among the challenges are finding for a way of verifying and assuring autonomous functionality, building trust in autonomous functions through testing and verification, and communicating the system’s reasoning to human operators. Other challenges include ensuring COLREG compliance for automated collision avoidance manoeuvres, measuring and quantifying changes in safety and efficiency when implementing new autonomous functions, and discovering what new risks are introduced when deploying new decision support tools on the bridge.
Decision support system
SAFEMATE is focused on developing and evolving a decision support system for safe navigation that can detect obstacles and threats in the marine environment, interpret this information and communicate a routeing solution to the onboard operator. The system is designed to give navigators enhanced situational awareness, including with regard to object detection and collision avoidance, based on images and data gathered from cameras, sensors, radar and the vessel’s automatic identification system (AIS) as well as the human-machine interface.
A prototype system is now being tested in a pilot on the operational ferry Bastø VI, serving the route between Moss and Horten in Norway. As well as being project administrators, DNV’s role in the four-year project, which has a number of industry participants, is developing an assurance regime necessary to integrate automated navigational decision support systems into bridge systems so as to ensure enhanced safety and efficiency.
