BMT will take the lead in a new £1.2million research project funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, the company said in its press release. Collaborating with ASV Global and Deimos Space UK, BMT will seek to address the challenge of how traditional manned vessels can co-exist with autonomous systems in shared water space. Deimos Space UK, the British subsidiary of Elecnor Deimos, will investigate how the exploitation of existing and future satellite capabilities can contribute to this objective.
The SWANS (Shared Waterspace Autonomous Navigation by Satellite) project will, for the first time, enable beyond line of sight, over the horizon, autonomous behaviour by unmanned surface vessels in areas of congested maritime traffic.
The project team will focus on four main objectives including: exploiting satellite sensing technology and enabling the delivery of a higher fidelity world model for vessel operators/supervisors; simulating new scenarios for ASV operations; combining, for the first time, ASV Global’s autonomous vessel control simulator and BMT’s REMBRANDT ship manoeuvring simulator into a single suite capable of visualising different datasets in 3D and to evaluate new multi-vessel conflict scenarios in the real-world.