ORCA AI: Industry leaders should be open-minded and embrace new digital tools

With this transformation on the horizon, stakeholders within the maritime industry are urged to embrace the advent of new digital tools, recognizing their potential in reducing workload, supporting optimal decision making and enhancing vessel performance. Yarden emphasizes his company’s commitment to reinforcing the human factor throughout the entire voyage, with computer intelligence. Foreseeing a shift in the role of navigation officers in the future, Yarden envisions a scenario where their primary responsibility would be monitoring, supported by cutting-edge technologies that will efficiently and safely direct vessels.

SAFETY4SEA: When it comes to tackling the smart-related challenges around the shipping sector, what are the core priorities in your agenda?

Yarden Gross: The shipping industry has four main challenges that increasingly smart tools such as our AI-driven platform are trying to solve.

1. The first is safety – minimising the risk of incidents (collisions, close encounters, groundings etc) especially in congested waters (busy coastal shipping lanes and channels, port approaches etc) and low visibility.
2. The second is the ongoing seafarer shortage, which we hear a lot about from customers. The crisis was compounded by the pandemic and is even greater today given that the war in Ukraine has removed a lot of Ukrainian and Russian from the seafarer pool.
3. The third challenge is to reduce fuel consumption, and consequently operating costs, and
4. The fourth is to reduce emissions generally and vessels’ CII rating specifically.

Against this background, the core priorities in Orca AI’s agenda are to leverage automation technology to, firstly, help solve the safety challenge, then extend to solving the other problems by enhancing navigational efficiency and overall vessel performance. We help to enhance safety by automating the workload burden on crews with advanced digital watchkeeping and alerts. Through automation our system also helps to alleviate the crewing shortage – the platform processes sensor data much faster than the human eye! By providing course adjustment recommendations (and in future we envision our platform actually implementing these in real time) we also address the last two challenges, thus avoiding excess fuel burn and emissions caused by inefficient/late manoeuvres.

Starting with the digital watchkeeping function, our focus is to eventually support human action and decision-making throughout the entire voyage with computer intelligence, similar to the role of flight computers in aviation. We foresee that in future the role of navigation officers, either on board or in remote control centres, will become more of a monitoring role, with technologies such as our platform actually directing the vessel, safely and efficiently.

S4S: Tell us a few words about the MEGURI2040 project. What role do you play in this project and what are your objectives?

Y.Gr.: The MEGURI2040 Fully Autonomous Ship Programme is administered by the Nippon Foundation and aims for the practical implementation of autonomous technology by 2025. The project brings together over 30 Japanese private companies in the Designing the Future of Full Autonomous Shipping (DFFAS+) consortium, to collaborate on the development of new equipment and systems enabling autonomous sailing tests of various coastal vessels, including merchant and passenger ships, over long distances in busy waters. As the only non-Japanese participating company, Orca AI’s digital lookout units will serve as the “eyes” of the demonstration vessels, enabling safe autonomous sailing supervised from shore.

S4S: How will this project accelerate the industry’s journey towards autonomous shipping? What will be the related challenges and opportunities for the industry from 2023 onwards?

Y.Gr.: The project will enable the industry to gain a lot of practical experience in how to develop reliable and robust autonomous technologies. Related challenges for the industry going forward include the adaptation and/or creation of new training standards suitable for autonomous operations, and the development of comprehensive class rules and IMO safety standards for autonomous operations.

S4S: What is currently the biggest challenge in the safe navigation of ships for the human factor?

Y.Gr.: There are three main challenges, all related to what we call ‘degradation of situational awareness’. The first is the combined risks of sailing in congested areas where many different types of vessels may be operating, including non-commercial vessels not complying with COLREGs collision-avoidance regulations. This results in complex navigational situations where it is often hard for crews to track multiple targets (which also include stationary objects such as buoys), exacerbating fatigue and stress. Detecting dangerous situations may happen too late and preventive action taken too late, resulting in a close encounter, near-miss, actual collision or grounding.

The second challenge is disorientation when sailing in low-visibility conditions such as bad weather, fog and at night. Notorious areas for fog, for example, include the China coast, the English Channel and the Singapore approaches. The third challenge is bridge officers suffering fatigue when sailing in open water. Many people don’t appreciate that when ships have been at sea for hours or days with nothing on the horizon, this in itself can create fatigue that can be problematic if an unexpected situation arises. If the crew is not optimally alert, we see from our own data that this can lead to risky close encounters. (Note that digital watchkeeping in this context is very simple to automate.)

S4S: How AI can help revolutionise safety in the global maritime industry? 

Y.Gr.: Digital watchkeeping leveraging AI-enabled high-accuracy object identification can alleviate the safety challenges, providing timely alerts and course-adjustment recommendations to the bridge crew to avoid potential incidents. Platforms such as Orca AI also reduce the lookout workload, allowing officers to focus on other more important tasks. Similarly, all smart tools using AI for voyage optimisation and condition monitoring, with data live-streamed from ships thanks to worldwide connectivity, will contribute to supercharging the efficiency of vessel operations and management – enhancing both the industry’s long-term sustainability and profitability.

S4S: Do you see crew members being burdened by oversupply of big data? What do you hear from seafarers/ operators with regards to the challenges posed by managing and analyzing big data?

Y.Gr.: Some crew members and shore-based fleet managers may be sceptical towards the introduction of more and more dashboards especially if each is a standalone system. However, in our experience, it is easy to win over individuals through thorough training, working closely with the customer from the outset and demonstrating very clearly how our system adds value and can make their daily work easier. I must emphasise here that it is not crew members or operators who actually manage and analyse big data. In terms of navigation, attempting to analyse all the incoming object detection data in congested traffic situations, and what to do in response, in your head would be impossible. Our digital lookout platform fuses big data from the camera sensors and other tools such as AIS and Radar to provide actionable insights for them.

S4S: Whether intentionally or not, the shipping sector is frequently accused of being quite conservative in the use of analytical and digital techniques. How open and welcoming has the industry been to new solutions?  What has been your feedback so far?

Y.Gr.: To answer your question, it really depends on the persona. Older personnel who are perhaps less open to technology may have a less intuitive approach. But in such cases, they just need more help and guidance on how to use a given platform to get the most value out of it. By tracking crews’ usage of our platform, we can highlight incorrect usage and focus our training on specific issues. All our customers have been very positive to our solution and with practice even the sceptics appreciate the value it offers, in reducing workload, supporting optimal decision making and enhancing vessel performance.

S4S: What is needed for the crew to make data-driven decisions effectively and identify unsafe or risky and inefficient behaviours easily?

Y.Gr.: Systems have to be reliable and proven in the field to build trust in their value. Through 24/7 recording of events, our platform ‘slices’ up the data to generate insights that enable vessel and fleet managers to identify inefficient behaviours and take remedial action through focused training. This is the base for customers to understand where the ‘gaps’ are, by enabling the identification of trends between ships, including similar voyages in similar conditions, across fleets, and by geographical area, so they can see how crew behaviour impacts both safety and performance. You simply wouldn’t know these parameters without the data analysis our platform provides. That is where its value and power lie.

S4S: When could we expect a more proactive move to autonomous shipping to launch and what is needed for this to happen?

Y.Gr.: There are quite a few autonomous shipping projects underway around the world, so the industry is already being proactive, especially for short distances like ferries, port tugs and so forth. If we narrow down to oceangoing vessels, completely autonomous operations along the lines of an aircraft autopilot are still some way off. Autonomy in this case is more about incremental automation, making certain parts of a voyage easier to perform, supporting crew in decision making whether on board or from remote control centres. Full autonomy that also handles complex aspects is more challenging, requiring collaboration with a range of stakeholders including regulators and class. Momentum is gathering but it is still early days. In terms of what is needed, the technology exists.

S4S: If you could change one thing from your perspective, what this one thing would it be and why?

Y.Gr.: I would change the rather slow speed of regulators, who need to move much faster with a closer focus on automation. This is critical and will have the biggest effect for the entire industry, as ships become more connected to the cloud. The fact that within a couple of years we will have 5G connectivity over the whole planet thanks to Starlink makes just about anything possible in terms of automation and live streaming of data to shore.

S4S: What is your message to industry stakeholders with regards to a more autonomous and sustainable future for shipping?

Y.Gr.: In my view, industry leaders should be open-minded and welcoming of digital tools that promise significant benefits for automating operations and improving crew and vessel performance, while also helping to make our oceans safer and shipping more sustainable.

The views presented hereabove are only those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of SAFETY4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes discussion purposes only.