93 was in fact to take on the authorities, their safety standards and inspectors, and see if it was possible to satisfy them with our technological capabilities. “Our facilities in Trondheim and Vanvikan sit across the Trondheim Fjord [Trondheimsfjorden] from each other, and we typically have a lot of crewed traffic between those two, including boats with passengers, every day. “Crewed boats must be very large, costly and polluting to carry a whole crew, rather than USVs, which are made only as big as needed to carry a cargo payload, so there was a great opportunity for cost and emissions savings by switching to a USV freight route. “But, honestly, a bigger motivator than those actual, practical benefits was that we’ve heard so much talk about uncrewed water transport and uncrewed maritime logistics, and we wanted to see for ourselves if we could stop talking about it and actually do it.” Maritime Robotics quickly formed a project team that included Hovstein, Eirik Moholt, the senior product manager for the Mariner USV (the testbed and proving platform for the uncrewed freight route) to cover the technical side of the work, and a PhD candidate at Maritime Robotics who specialised in the legislative side of autonomous maritime logistics. The team subsequently approached Norway’s maritime regulation authorities, the Norwegian Coastal Administration (NCA) and the Norwegian Maritime Authority (NMA) to query the necessary paperwork, USV modifications, risk analyses, visitations and so on that would be needed for permits to carry out the freight route on a routine basis. Beyond the will to tackle a big challenge, the company had another vital motivation for gaining this approval, as Moholt explains: “A key technical motivation came from the fact that Maritime Robotics is expanding like crazy, if we may say so, and as a consequence we decided to move the manufacturing of our smaller USVs, the Otters, from the Trondheim side to the larger and more production-appropriate Vanvikan facility.” This meant relocating a massive inventory of tools, machine parts and stationery that are vital to the Otter production personnel from one coast to the other, with all the ensuing fuel, boat crew and large boat maintenance costs – unless these duties could be delegated to smaller, more efficient USVs instead, of which Maritime Robotics unsurprisingly had many in stock. “The CEO literally asked us why we were whining about the costs and logistics of moving everything when we had an autonomous fleet ready to go. He even took some inspiration from how Boeing builds its planes at one facility before flying them to another for retrofitting,” Moholt says. “It might not have been cost-effective to go through all the approvals just for this one route, unless we took Eirik’s [Hovstein’s] perspective that it was a chance to prove-out a model for future uncrewed freight operations, and also it means accruing a huge wealth of new testing and maturation hours for the Mariner USV by getting it to do these transport routes. “We would have been out testing the Mariner at least once a week anyway; testing new software, custom hardware integrations, all year round. But, with the freight route, we get plenty of testing done, even more test hours than usual per week, and simultaneously move all the assets for the Otter manufacturing over to the Vanvikan facility. “We’re using the testing for something really useful now and getting more value out of the whole thing.” Maritime Robotics sees widespread use-cases for operations similar to the Trondheim-Vanvikan route Maritime Robotics USV | UVIO Uncrewed Systems Technology | October/November 2024 Exhaustive proving of the Mariner’s safety, intelligence and redundancies to the Norwegian maritime safety regulators was needed to gain approval for the uncrewed freight route USVs are only as big as needed to carry a cargo payload, so there was a great opportunity for cost and emissions savings by switching to a USV freight route
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