Marine Autonomous Systems News

Melanie Olsen is harnessing 10 years of missile defense and electronic warfare systems expertise to drive rapid technological innovation in marine research and monitoring. Today, on International Women in Engineering Day, the AIMS Team Leader for Technology Development Engineering shares her unique journey.Growing up in a third-generation farming family near the small settlement of El Arish in north Queensland, Melanie Olsen thought engineers were train drivers.When a James Cook University engineering lecturer visited her small rural high school with a quad helicopter…

The operation of autonomous vessels can meet, if not exceed, current collision avoidance (COLREG) rules, as demonstrated during the recently completed £1.3 million ($1.8 million) MAXCMAS (MAchine eXecutable Collision regulations for Marine Autonomous Systems) research project. Project partners Rolls-Royce, Lloyd’s Register, Warsash Maritime Academy (WMA), Queen’s University Belfast and Atlas Elektronik (AEUK) found that use of newly developed algorithms allowed existing COLREGs to remain relevant in a crewless environment…

ABS weighs in on the way forward for marine autonomous systems and navigation technology. The era of digitization and hyper-connectivity is taking the maritime industry on a journey as it transitions from ‘smart’ to remotely operated and then, to autonomous vessels. The OSV sector – and offshore workboats in general – may well be leading that transition, with some projections for remote-controlled vessels as soon as next year. Many new technologies (sensors, navigational systems…

LR is participating in the MAXCMAS project, a £1.27million collaborative research project that aims to investigate, develop and implement real-time collision avoidance algorithms for autonomous maritime vessels. The MAXCMAS project aims to develop COLREGs (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972) compliant collision avoidance navigation for autonomous ships and other Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs). Compliance with current and future regulations is instrumental to the wide-scale use of USVs at sea. Being able to demonstrate satisfactory autonomous operation that meets the COLREGs is also pivotal to maritime safety. The project also hopes to carry out comprehensive machine execution of the COLREGs and demonstrate these in part in real-world representative sea trials.

The final phase of a competition to develop novel adaptive autonomous ocean sampling network (AAOSN) management systems for the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) is now underway. Two UK consortia will move forward to develop systems capable of coordinating a suite of marine autonomous vehicles gathering data from the ocean over periods of months, and tracking and sampling dynamic features. The two-phase competition was launched last September by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in partnership with the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and Innovate UK…

Three marine robot vehicles have been launched from Plymouth today to undertake a fish tracking mission in and around new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Scientists from the Marine Biological Association (MBA) and engineers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) are working together on this pioneering project to study how fish use these areas on a day-to-day basis. Using acoustic pingers, plaice, sole, brill and rays are being tracked at sea by the ocean robots programmed…

The Duke University Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness (CGGC) recently completed a study on ocean technologies, including remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), for a consortium led by Nova Scotia’s Department of Economic and Rural Development and Tourism (ERDT). Excerpts from the report on the market and technology trends in ROVs and AUVs are provided in this article. Global ROV vehicle sales in 2010 totaled approximately $850 million.