The EUR 8 million SafeNav (Safer Navigation) maritime safety project, co-funded by the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), has been officially launched.
The project aims to lead a path towards safer and more secure bridge navigation today while moving towards tomorrow’s world of remote operations and autonomous shipping.
The system will consist of a module for automated collision prevention and avoidance, complemented by a decision-support module providing an effective visual representation for navigators of multi-source data harvested from state-of-the-art sensors and other relevant sources.
At the heart of the SafeNav solution is consortium partner Ladar. Its Ladar Sensor Suite technology uses a combination of sensors and cameras to detect, classify and track /targets, as well as partially submerged objects, in the vessel’s path. Studies will also be carried out on how to avoid collisions with marine mammals.
“The ambition and objective of the project is to develop and test a highly innovative collision-prevention solution that will significantly reduce the probability of collisions and groundings, thereby enhancing safer navigation for existing vessels and the new generation of ships designed for remote operations and autonomy in the future,” said SafeNav inventor capt. Jorgen Grindevoll.
“The SafeNav project is an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to the maritime sector. With the support of a strong consortium, the next few years will be full of dynamic collaboration and hands-on research and development to tackle the issue of navigational accidents at sea with an innovative digital solution,” said capt. Lance Savaria, head of projects at Offshore Monitoring (OSM), which will oversee management, coordination and overall technical development of the three-year project.
Global Maritime Services (GMS), headed by capt. Igor Toncic, are the marine / navigation experts in charge of the user-requirements. GMS is also ensuring that SafeNav will be easily adapted to the way of “remote /operating the ships in the near future.”
Consortium member SAYFR will address the root causes of accidents, human behavior on the bridge (navigators) and develop a navigation risk model.
In addition to Ladar (UK), SAYFR (Norway) and Offshore Monitoring (Cyprus), the SafeNav consortium includes maritime companies Naval Group subsidiary Sirehna (France) and Danaos Shipping Co (Greece) and SMEs Global Maritime Services (UK) as marine advisors and Greenov-ITES (France) taking care of the environmental scope.
R&D institutes and universities that will participate in the technical development of algorithms for SafeNav include Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum (IMEC) in Belgium, University of Rijeka (UNIRI) in Croatia and the University of Genova (UNIGE) in Italy.
SafeNav has also received co-funding from the European Commission Foundation Programme, and UK Research and Innovation.
