Sea Machines Robotics announced that it has completed the world’s first 1,000 nautical miles autonomous and remotely commanded journey of a commercial vessel.
More specifically, under the project Machine Odyssey, the autonomous tug Nellie Bly successfully completed its journey in 129 operational hours over 13 days.
96.9% of the journey was accomplished under fully autonomous control and the SM300 executed 31 collision-avoidance and traffic separation maneuvers, according to the company.
The completion of this voyage marks the catalyst for a new era of at-sea operations
states Michael Johnson, CEO of Sea Machines.
During the voyage, the tug averaged a speed of 7.9 knots, while Sea Machines gathered 3.8TB of essential operational data showcasing how the ships can readily connect as IOT systems into the cloud economy.
The SM300 also provided an active chart of the environment and live augmented overlays which were depicting the progress of the mission, state of the vessel, situational awareness of the domain, real-time vessel-borne audio, and video from many streaming cameras.
Furthermore, Sea Machines used renewable hydro-treated vegetable oil (HVO) biofuel to reduce the number of harmful emissions.
Remotely commanded autonomous vessels provide the marine industries with the platform necessary to be competitive in the modern world, delivering significant increases in productivity and operational safety, digitized ultra-efficiency and response speed, and will provide a new world of actionable operational data for improved planning and business practices
concluded Mr. Johnson.
