Roll-Royce and Japanese shipping company MOL announced the successful conclusion of a joint pilot project onboard the 165m passenger ferry ‘Sunflower Gold’, which proved how Intelligent Awareness and machine learning technologies can significantly improve navigational safety.
Results from sea trials on the vessel, which operates night-time sailings between Kobe and Oita, Japan, found that the navigating officers were able to visually detect objects that would otherwise have been cloaked by the blackness of night.
The vessel navigates the Akashi Kaikyo, Bisan Seto and Kurushima Straits, some of the most challenging routes in the world. However, operations are more difficult during night-time crossings when these routes become heavily congested with fishing nets and small to mid-sized fishing vessels.
In particular, Rolls-Royce installed an array of Intelligent Awareness sensors, thermal imaging cameras and its revolutionary Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system on the vessel in April 2018, following the 2017 signing of a joint development agreement with MOL.
The technology was fused together to give the vessel’s bridge team day-time-like situational awareness of the surrounding area, providing enhanced decision-making capability and improving the safety of the vessel.
Data obtained from this and other Rolls-Royce Intelligent Awareness (IA) projects will now be fed into the company’s machine learning algorithms to further develop the IA system, with the objective of putting a permanent installation aboard the ‘Sunflower Gold’ later this year.
We specified the configuration of Intelligent Awareness for our ferry with Rolls-Royce’s advanced sensing and data fusion technology. The trial result was successful and we had good feedback from our crew. We are expecting to get a more effective and helpful system for our passenger ferry from the findings and the result of this project,
…said Kenta Arai, Director at MOL.
Data captured from tests onboard Finferries’ 65m double-ended ferry Stella, which operates between Korpo and Houtskär in the Archipelago Sea on the southwest coast of Finland, will also be fed into the Rolls-Royce machine learning algorithm.
