Damen alliance to advance ship autonomy

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Damen Shipyard has signed an alliance agreement with an autonomous technology company to further investigate the adoption of collision avoidance functionality onboard of Damen ships.

automation alliance

Toine Cleophas (Manager Research, Damen Shipyards Gorinchem), Frank Relou (European Business Development Manager, Sea Machines), Michiel Louwerse (Program Manager Sustainability, Damen Shipyards Gorinchem). Photo: Damen

This alliance between Damen Shipyard and US-based Sea Machines Robotics aims at speeding up the adoption of several navigating technologies to increase autonomy levels on Damen-built vessels.

Toine Cleophas, research manager at Damen, said: “This alliance will play an important role towards the realisation of Damen’s strategy, which is built on the continual development of digitalisation, sustainability and operational excellence of Damen products and services.”

SM300 adoption

Damen will adopt the Sea Machines SM300 autonomous-command and remote-helm control technology in its test environment to predict the integration complexity and system performance on any kind of Damen vessel. By adopting this solution in software models, a digital twin of the ship becomes reality and will display the benefits of autonomous technology even before it is installed onboard.

The Sea Machine collision avoidance system can support the crew in a variety of ways. The SM300 system puts the navigator in a supervisory role, allowing him to multitask or even rest, while the ship sails its route and avoids collisions based on COLREG. By using multiple sensors in the system, such as radar and cameras and combining this with machine learning algorithms, the system uses artificial intelligence to recognise objects and manoeuvre the ship safely to its destination.

Damen is continuing with its R&D Smart Ship programme. As part of this programme, the Damen Triton programme is already creating a data connection between ship and shore. Triton provides ship data to a variety of users, with or without data analytics, paving the way for increased efficiency and sustainability in operations.

In the alliance with Sea Machines, the Triton solution will be a linking pin between the onboard autonomous technology, the onshore monitoring and data analytics.

By Rebecca Jeffrey