Page 18: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (December 2023)

ROBOTICS

All images courtesy Fairbanks Morse Defense

ROBOTICS in the Engine room he FMD team that Trey Taylor leads is relatively new, kicking off

When talk turns to in 2019 with a baseline product that was looking at monitoring autonomous ships, a equipment, “being able to provide that information back to our

Ttechnical teams for diagnosis and also to give some data to the end ? rst question usually customer for self-support.” But that was just the start, and in 2020 Taylor’s centers on how routine team pitched the executive team for more. The result was “a roadmap for ? ve product verticals that we were interested in: AI, autonomy, robotics, mixed and emergency repair reality capability and secure communications.” and maintenance

In the development of robotic solutions for routine and emergency work will be conducted and repair in the engine room, Taylor credits his boss, FMD CEO George

Whittier, for instilling his principle: “Don’t aim at the target, aim where the with no crew. Trey target’s going to be.”

Taylor, Director of

So, Taylor and his team of 22 started looking more closely at one of its prime

Digital Innovation, customers – the U.S. Navy. “We know that the Navy has a need, a desire to ? ll uncrewed assets sometime later this decade, and the timeframe that they want

Fairbanks Morse these assets to be on deployment without intervention is today only about 30 to

Defense, discusses 60 days,” said Taylor. “But the long-term goal is 180 days, so our team started looking at systems for how to help the Navy achieve that goal. We quickly

FMD’s research and came to the conclusion that we’re going to have to do maintenance, but how development efforts on do we do maintenance when there’s not a human on board?” Enter the robot.

next-gen engine room

Today, FMD’s work centers not on a single solution, rather a number of dif- ferent manifestations of how engine room robotics will look and work. “We robotics.

decided a robot platform is probably going to be the right approach, but we By Greg Trauthwein

MR #12 (18-33).indd 18 12/5/2023 12:24:08 PM