Page 62: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (November 2021)

Tech Files

Innovative products, technologies and concepts

Shed the Satellite: Quantum Sensors hold Promise for future compact, ? eldable, GPS-Free Navigation

Don’t let the titanium metal walls by shining lasers into small clouds of or the sapphire windows fool you. It’s rubidium gas like the one Sandia has what’s on the inside of this small, curi- contained.

ous device that could someday kick off While work is progressing at speed, a new era of navigation. there remain hurdles: namely size and

For more than a year, the avocado- energy consumption.

sized vacuum chamber has contained a “When you move it into the real world cloud of atoms at the right conditions there are lots of problems you have to for precise navigational measurements. solve. Two are making the sensor com-

Photo by Bret Latter

It is the ? rst device that is small, energy- pact and rugged. The physics takes place

A compact device designed & built at ef? cient and reliable enough to poten- all in a cubic centimeter (0.06 cubic

Sandia National Laboratories could become a pivotal component of next- tially move quantum sensors — sensors inches) of volume, so anything larger generation navigation systems. that use quantum mechanics to outper- than that is wasted space,” said Sandia form conventional technologies — from Countless devices around the world postdoctoral scientist Bethany Little, the lab into commercial use, said San- use GPS for way? nding, but GPS sig- who is contributing to the research. dia National Laboratories scientist Peter nals can be jammed or spoofed. So in- The Sandia team is continuing to

Schwindt. Sandia developed the cham- stead of relying on satellites, Schwindt monitor the device. Their goal is to keep ber as a core technology for future navi- said future vehicles might keep track of it sealed and operational for ? ve years, gation systems that don’t rely on GPS their own position. an important milestone toward showing satellites, he said. It was described ear- They could do that with on-board de- the technology is ready to be ? elded. In lier this year in the journal AVS Quan- vices as accurate as atomic clocks, but the meantime, they’re exploring ways to tum Science. that measure acceleration and rotation streamline manufacturing.

Arti? cial Intelligence: NYK, Orca AI partner on safety support systems for autonomous vessels

Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK) and MTI Co. Ltd. (MTI) in- stalled Orca AI’s Automatic Ship Tar- get Recognition System onto an NYK

Group ship for research on the future of autonomous operations. Orca’s system will be installed on a trial basis to verify whether the safety of the ship’s opera- tion can be improved by automating the task of recognizing dangerous objects.

Photo by Orca AI

This trial will assess the system’s abil-

The ORCA AI platform.

ity to automatically recognize danger- ous targets and other vessels that may be A camera unit will shoot day and night displayed in an integrated manner to a overlooked by the human eye, especially to automatically recognize ships and tar- tablet or touch-panel monitor display.

at night and in congested waters through gets and measure the distance to them. In addition, the system is epoch-mak- vision sensors and Thermal cameras, as Information obtained from navigational ing because it can independently recog- well as AI-powered algorithms which equipment; including vessel names, dis- nize small ? shing boats and small mark- constantly analyze the environment and tance, and time when the ship is closest ers that are not captured by radar and not alert crew to dangerous situations. to the target, can be superimposed and equipped with AIS. 62 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • November 2021

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