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AUTONOMOUS WORKBOATS

Credit: Wärtsilä loop. It’s about making them more effective and reducing risk.” nology perspective, they’re always on and they never get tired.

Black expects humans will remain in the picture for the They can feed information and alerts to the pilots.” foreseeable future, and technology will allow them to shift “Look at what’s going on aboard a busy vessel – whether it’s into roles that are more supervisory, tapping computer vision, a survey boat or a tug – there’s a lot of activity going on. What sensor fusion and data collection to leverage expanded situ- our systems help crews to do is focus on the activity that is ational awareness and advanced pilot capabilities. “Autonomy, most important to them, whether that’s external to the boat or at this stage in the game, is really about situational awareness looking off the tech, and simply managing or executing that and sensors use. These need to be developed completely be- mission,” Black says.

fore you’re talking about true autonomy. In the meantime, “At the end of the day, human senses have limitations. there are things we can do that allow the pilot to have better That’s the reason we have a lot of devices like radar, sonar, all situational awareness – what’s going on inside and outside of the rest of it, on the boat in the ?rst place. When we look at their boat – that allows them to execute on a mission. They what we do, we’re bringing all that together and consolidating can be sitting at the helm but not necessarily driving the boat. it and making it far more consumable via human. When you

They can watch what’s going on and they can intervene.” look at it from that perspective, there’s no workboat or any “If you can take some of the human risk elements out of type of vessel that can’t take advantage of that.” the boat, it doesn’t mean you’re taking the humans out of it too. What you’re trying to do is make it less risk-prone,” Black

PUTTING THE TOOLS TO USE says. “There’s no person that could possibly have 100% execu- In August 2019, Sea Machines demonstrated its SM300 tion all of the time. Whereas when you look at it from a tech- vessel intelligence systems on board a Vigor/Kvichak Marine

April 2020 30 MN