Page 20: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (February 2022)

Bridge Tech: Automation

With nearly 90% of Furuno’s annual revenue coming from maritime, Matt

Wood, National Sales Manager, Furuno

USA said: “Marine is what we do. Research and Development (R&D) is our engine, and the majority of employees in the company are engineers.”

Watch the interview with Matt Wood @ bit.ly/3rnuLD7

Photo courtesy Furuno USA

Furuno sells a complete AR kit, merging camera, EC- For its part, Furuno established a special division to

DIS, radar, GPS, heading, satellite compass, doppler accelerate the development of sensors and technologies speed log and satellite doppler speed log. that will enable the creation of this fully automated “We’re merging all of those technologies into a heads- ship by 2025, mobilizing its researchers, developers, up display that today is a conventional play in the front and companies to make help bring the project to reality.

of the bridge,” said Wood. “But it could be put into a headset, an overhead or a projection.” The Digital Path

Wood said the company has intentionally started As is the case with any engineered product, it is the small. “It’s not particularly expensive technology; core foundation of R&D that is critical to delivering a we’re looking at (about) $25,000 to add to an existing sound solution, and for Furuno that all starts with digi- for Furuno bridge. But we envision that kind of tech- tal signal processing and the adaptation of other digital nology is going to continue to take off” and effectively technologies from outside the maritime space. “For us serve as a gateway technology to future automation and digitization, most simplistically, initially, has meant a autonomy. transition from analog technology to digital technol-

Augmented reality technology has been implemented ogy. While that’s a bit simplistic, it’s really important successfully in the automotive and gaming industries for us to underscore how vital that digitization has been but has not been widely deployed in a maritime envi- for growing our technology in leaps and bounds. We ronment. Furuno developed the concept and presented had a really good analog radar before, we have an even it for the first time at a maritime exhibition, where it better digital radar now.” attracted the interest of Mitsui OSK Lines. Furuno and This mantra runs throughout the Furuno product line,

Mitsui OSK Lines embarked on a joint development and the digital footprint extends far beyond the prod- project and, and after a year and a half of development, uct, system, and even the ship.

the partners launched their product in May of 2019 on “We are enabling a much higher and deeper level 21 VLCCs, and growth has been strong ever since. of connectivity between the shore side of operations,

AR is just one step on the autonomous journey, as it to better understand what’s going on with the vessel. alone cannot mitigate all accident risks. One of our subsidiaries, Furuno Hellas in Greece, have

In Japan, in 2020, under the sponsorship of the Nip- come out with a product that they call HermAce, which pon Foundation, MEGURI 2040, began a joint project is full-scale, remote monitoring system that was award- to develop the world’s first completely crewless ship. ed Lloyd’s Register world’s first Digital Twin Ready 20 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • February 2022

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