Page 20: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2020)

Back to the Drawing Board

Partnering on the Digital Ship

Inside Denmark’s ShippingLab enmark’s ShippingLab project is a three- Growth in the Blue Denmark cluster launched by the Danish year initiative that commenced its work in Government at the beginning of 2018,” said Associate Pro-

March 2019 with the aim of developing the fessor Roberto Galeazzi of the DTU Automation and Control ? rst fully commercially operational, fully Group. “Three main research drives were the focus: digita-

D digital, autonomous and environmentally lization, autonomy and decarbonization. The ShippingLab friendly ship. There are almost 30 part- forum was set up thanks in a collaboration between Danish ners working together within ShippingLab, Maritime, Danish Shipping, Force Technology, Maritime En- which is coordinated by the Danish maritime cluster, Blue gineering DTU, CBS, the Danish Metalworkers Union and

Denmark. A lead partner is The Automation and Control the Danish Maritime Authority.”

Group within the Technical University of Denmark’s Depart- ment of Electrical Engineering which has researched autono- Full-scale Autonomous Operation mous systems for the past 25-30 years focusing on diverse Based on ongoing research efforts by Professor Mogens application domains including marine craft. Around 2010- Blanke, Associate Professor Galeazzi and Associate Profes- 2011, in collaboration with the Royal Danish Navy, the group sor Søren Hansen, a proposal was made to set up an innova- started a series of projects looking into the development of tion project for the development and full-scale demonstration control and perception algorithms for achieving unmanned of functionalities/systems for the autonomous navigation and operation of a high-speed waterjet. Over a period of four to supervision of passenger ferries in Danish waters.

? ve years, this collaboration produced signi? cant know-how “In particular the core idea was to develop advanced tools on the challenges connected with object detection and classi- for autonomous navigation and decision support by exploit- ? cation during navigation, and it quali? ed the group to scien- ing state-of-the-art electro-optical sensor technology and ti? cally steer an investigation promoted by the Danish Mari- methods in sensor fusion, AI and control theory to enable time Authority, the Electronic Outlook project (2017-2019), vessels to operate with a partly unattended bridge,” explained to evaluate the potential of electro-optical sensing devices Galeazzi. “Based on this idea, DTU succeeded in gathering as complementary means to increase the awareness of the a strong network of industrial stakeholders from the Danish navigator. One year into this investigation additional funding maritime cluster that shared the vision of demonstrating the was raised to perform research on methods and algorithms autonomous ship in Denmark.” for developing solutions as part of the Autonomous Situation The focus on ferries was inspired by the geographical com-

Awareness for Navigation (ASAN) project, which runs from position of Denmark, a country characterized by many small 2018-2021. islands with rather limited connectivity with the mainland. It “ShippingLab was actually initially established in the fall was envisioned that autonomous ferries could, in the short 2017 as an innovation forum aiming at creating and develop- to medium term, improve transportation at sea since reduced ing R&D ideas with the ultimate purpose of making Denmark manning on a single ferry could generate more passages by a global maritime power hub, as envisioned by the Plan for redistributing personnel. In the long term, it was anticipated

Applying ‘deep learn- A TUCO Marine sup- ing’ methods for the port vessel taking part detection, classi? cation in tracking systems test- and tracking of ships and ing in Faaborg, Denmark buoys during navigation. in December 2019. 20 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • September 2020

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