When I attended various exhibitions this spring, my main focus was to find out who is offering solutions to Autonomy and Remote Controlling of things, and who is possible looking into these Autonomous operations, on land and sea. It surely was an interesting task. I focus on vessels in this article.
Situational awareness
The situational awareness was at top on sea, since vessels need to recognise other vessels and various other things and then make decision based on that interpretation of recognition. They are amazing devices and in my opinion even better and safer seafarers than we old (
and young) school sailors. Better and safer since they don’t take risks, they follow the rules, feels no fatigue and 24/7 in tip top shape. This visual aid technology has developed to an art form when combining information from LiDAR, Camera, Radar and from radio side VDES. When you add on top of that a Remote Control Operator monitoring the navigation I would consider those vessels to be ultra safe.
Situational awareness is taken care by camera based technologies and position from GNSS, so you know exactly where you are in this world. When navigating near shore, then LTE and visual recognition would be enough to navigate safely, just like cars navigate now.
Dead Reckoning
As we know the GNSS can be spoofed, jammed or denied altogether, so autonomous machines need a system that can tolerate that issue. This was my main mission on these exhibitions I visited, to introduce our newly developed IPESSA Yaw Bar and its base product IPESSA Tiny, which don’t care about that jamming, spoofing and de
nial since they are superior dead reckoning devices as well.
Dynamic Positioning systems
When I was selling DP systems to vessels years ago the word there that mattered most was redundancy. You needed to have redundancy according to class notation in the DP-system in order to even get the job. Redundancy levels are from DP 1-3. DP0 and a joystick is handy as well. To have that DP 1-3 vessel you need to have many separate position reference systems onboard according to the level your vessel have, if you loose one position reference system you still have another in hot stand-by and it takes over, so no worries.
Redundancy
Now to the main point I’m trying to address here, it’s the redundancy of those autonomous machines that rely only on GNSS and Visual means, GNSS can be unreliable, that we know, but disturbance means to the visual recognition, that’s something to think of! Anyway in my opinion the autonomous machines needs to have higher level of redundancy in positioning and navigation.
IPESSA Yaw Bar
The top of the range IPESSA YawBar is an answer to that redundancy. It has RTK GNSS IMU and 3-axis closed loop, solid state FOG (soon to be north seeking as well), so it is perfect Transmitting Heading Device that helps autonomous machines navigate without the GNSS and Visual aid safely when that kind of disturbance occurs during the mission you have set your Autonomous machine to do. I would feel much safer and confident to send my expensive equipment “on the road” when I know it can navigate even without the external position references.
Kindhelm made an outstanding compact multi-ability device for safer navigation.
Ask us and we tell you more and even better, we can supply you these devices.
Kind regards, Jorma Koponen, Capt. Kindhelm Product and Quality Manager
