94 UVIO | Maritime Robotics USV elsewhere, including locally, with multiple remote islands dotting the coasts around Trondheim, the population of each one varying from two to upwards of 20 people. Today, such islands only receive mail (including deliveries of medicine and internet-purchased commodities) once per week, so the flexibility and low cost of a USV compared with delivery boats could enable a higher quality of life for such communities with lower overheads. “On top of that, Trondheim and much of northern Norway are home to many Michelin-quality restaurants, who rely on frequent but small deliveries of fresh ingredients, plus tools for the gathering or preparation of food, and other items,” Hovstein says. “Thirty to 40 years ago, there were a lot more small transport boats operating, so it was possible for restaurants, home groceries and other small batches of goods to be cost-effectively delivered when needed. A lot of that has since been displaced by business models centred around huge freight vessels, which help their owners to be profitable, but can’t dock at or serve small community harbours. USVs can though, and they can handle pretty much any hard weather too, night and day, which could mean a new era of flexibility, emissions and convenience in marine deliveries.” The Mariner USV First detailed in Issue 39, the Mariner is a 5.9 m long, 2.06 m wide and 2.7 m tall (50 cm draft) vessel. It runs on a 195 bhp Yanmar diesel engine with both water-jet and electric thruster propulsion, with a typical operating endurance of 50 hours. Its hull and superstructure are built from polyethylene, a low-maintenance material that does not corrode from seawater and exhibits very high impact resistance. Atop the structure, deck hatches open to enable access to a cavity for installing payloads, such as sensors for a moon pool module, as well as space for additional batteries. Naturally, this space can also be used for cargo. Be prepared Hovstein and Moholt give significant praise to the NCA and the NMA for being prepared that a USV manufacturer would one day come forward to get an uncrewed freight route authorised. “They had a very proactive approach in how they responded to us, and very much wanted our use-case to function as a demonstrator for other USV manufacturers and operators to follow,” Hovstein says. “The biggest risk they focused on, of course, was collision with crewed boats, as the risk to human life is always prioritised in regulators’ metrics. So, a lot of their rounds revolved around verifying that the situational awareness of the Mariner and our control room were always either as good as or even better than that of a human on deck, so that things like larger boats or small kayakers could always be detected at range.” This involved demonstrations by Maritime Robotics, with Moholt and his fellows deploying Mariner USVs for NCA and NMA agents several times over, and talking them through its various functions and subsystems. Often, this involved following the USV on a safety boat, which enabled proving of the system at sea, including showing its perception sensors, decision-making algorithms, and data links, all functioning in real-world maritime traffic and weather. “We showed them the sensors were working both on the VCS [vehicle control station] interface and in our control rooms at Trondheim and Vanvikan. In fact, they were very familiar with the sensor technologies we used for autonomous perception, because you’ll find pretty much all of them on Norwegian passenger boats too,” Hovstein notes. “In the Norwegian winter, before 10 am and after 3 pm, it is dark. Boat and ship captains here know you can’t sail using eyes alone. They are permitted to move at 30 knots in complete darkness, and they use instruments like camera, radar and GNSS to do it. Cameras can verify the presence and positions of lighthouses more scientifically than human vision, and we can even install microphones on the USV to detect audio cues like ship horns.” Engineering redundancies Maritime Robotics made sure the Mariner is compliant with DNV CG 0264 on autonomous ships (despite being meant for far larger vessels), which involved engineering redundancies for power, propulsion, communication and computing. Each of these subsystems therefore has at least one form of backup to October/November 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Per regulators’ requirements, considerable risk analysis, maintenance inspections and route checks are needed before the USV can deploy
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