Ship pilotage
Danish waters are some of the busiest in the world and at the same time the passage to and from the Baltic Sea. Every year, the route is traveled by thousands of large ships with dangerous goods, among other things from the large Russian oil terminals.
As per the Danish Pilotage Act, it is mandatory to use a pilot for vessels passing to or from Danish ports and/or anchorages in Danish territorial waters, if the vessel carries oil or has uncleaned cargo tanks that have not been rendered safe with inert gas.
The project
SLGREEN increases energy efficiency, accelerates the green transition of the global maritime sector, and develop the position of the Danish maritime industry (Blue Denmark) as frontrunner for decarbonisation by promoting a digital and safe transformation through a cohesive and multifaceted innovation action.
SLGREEN research and innovation action builds on five technical work packages complemented by two work packages that explore the societal and regulatory challenges for the upscaling and commercialization of the developed technologies.
Each technical work packages focuses on one pathway towards the decarbonization of the maritime industry.
Remote and automated
The consortium gathered by ShippingLab consists of 4 work packages of which DTU Electro leads one: "Digital land-based pilotage and remote navigation". The overarching objective is to develop an integrated system for digital piloting enabling remote navigation of ships through coastal waters and into harbours.
This technology will allow companies providing piloting services, like DanPilot, to provide navigation guidance to the crew onboard a vessel transiting e.g. in Danish waters without the need of physically transferring the pilot from shore to the vessel. This change of the way the pilotage service is provided is expected to have a significant positive impact in terms of CO2 emissions because of the diminished need of transferring piloting personnel from shore.
DTU Electro will further advance its research on technologies enabling the autonomous navigation of ships. In particular we will focus on how to use diverse sensor data collected onboard a vessel through legacy navigation systems such as radar and GPS and novel sensor technologies, i.e. cameras in the visible and infrared range to create a robust and resilient digital representation of the navigation scenario for a pilot seated onshore several nautical miles away from the vessel.
Another area of research that we will prioritize is the development of intelligent algorithms that allows for the optimal utilization of the communication bandwidth between ship and shore to enable the transfer of data needed to create the digital representation of the navigation scenario.
Methodology
The team will combine theoretical investigations with empirical analysis where the collected data will provide a strong foundation for developing solutions of interest. Two specific technical areas will be researched: resilient simultaneous localization and mapping for situational awareness exploiting a variety of sensor technologies, and optimal ship-shore data transfer. The research action will bring together fault diagnosis, Bayesian estimation, simultaneous localization, mapping and machine learning.
DTU will employ three new researchers: two postdocs and 1 PhD student. The DTU Electro SLGREEN team will be completed by January 1 2025. The research action is led by Associate Professors Roberto Galeazzi and Dimitrios Papageorgiou.
The scientific endeavour builds on the outstanding research performance on the development of enabling technologies for autonomous navigation, which led to the public demo of the autonomous ferry GreenHopper in 2022 (LINK)
Applications
The development of a remote navigation solution increases the efficiency of sailing through confined waters, where the use of pilots is necessary. A digital land-based pilotage solution will enable operators to avoid sailing out of route and slowing down to embark and disembark the pilot, an operation that increases the fuel consumption, extends the duration of the voyage and is risky for both pilot and crew.
The average vessel will save approximately 20 tonnes CO2 on a land-based pilot operation from Bornholm to Skagen. DanPilot has approximately 20,000 transit pilot operations every year.
Fuel consumption and emissions related to pilot transport from shore and back will be reduced to zero and the solution will enable each pilot to handle more vessels, thereby mitigating the issue of growing shortage of experienced pilots.
Digital pilotage and remote navigation will not only positively contribute to the decarbonization of the maritime sector, it will also reduce the exposure of pilots to challenging maritime environments during the transfer and onboarding phases of the piloting service.
Though the primary field of application is remote navigation of ships, some of the key building blocks could find application also in other domains where drone and robotic technologies are adopted. For example, resilient mapping and localization of autonomous robotic systems is relevant in many application domains where the safety and reliability of the system is paramount, such as agricultural robotics, defense robotics, inspection and maintenance robotics, etc.
Output
The team expects to be able to demonstrate a prototype of a system for remote situation awareness that will allow the pilot to make informed decisions about which course of action to take in order to safely navigate vessels into a harbour. Moreover, they will demonstrate that such a system is resilient to malfunctioning of one or more navigation sensors. Lastly, they will promote control strategies that enable the optimal data transfer from ship to shore in the presence of a multi-channel communication infrastructure.
