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The knowledge bank of ESA’s R&D programmes

Enabling Harbor to Harbor Autonomous Shipping in Sea Ice Conditions

Programme
Discovery
Programme Reference
20-D-T-TEC-02-c
Start Date
End Date
Status
Closed
Country
Finland
Enabling Harbor to Harbor Autonomous Shipping in Sea Ice Conditions
Description

The ENHANCE (Enabling Harbor to Harbor Autonomous Situational Awareness in Sea Ice Conditions) project is aimed to study How to improve the autonomous navigation and situational awareness in the maritime domain by utilising ML and AI concepts. For this end, we utilise both traditional RGB cameras as well as IR cameras to obtain as diverse as possible data set of sea-ice conditions to train a ML model that can identify an ice tracks and objects, such as buoys, that can help in navigation. In addition to the camera concepts, we study the impact of possible multipath impacts caused by sea-ice on traditional GNSS receivers. As with the ML data sets, the number of studies focusing on behaviour of the GNSS signals in maritime winter navigation are limited, thus additional information is needed to better understand possible problems that will be encountered when designing a fully autonomous vessel.

Executive summary