Yanmar is moving ahead quickly in the field of creating a totally autonomous blue-water boat, one that navigates and docks all on its own. The company already has developed a docking system that works much faster than a previous version, and an offshore nav system that seems much safer.
Yanmar is concentrating on its autonomous marine technology largely because of labor shortages in Japan’s fisheries industries – at a time when the marine aquaculture industry is booming in Asia. The engine builder wants to create a vessel that can serve the fishing fleet without the need to put a crew on board.
Starting in 2017, Yanmar created an unmanned Robotic Boat as a deep-sea exploration vessel. The nav system required the entry of several waypoints between the departure and arrival points. Now it has improved the system so the route can be created automatically and takes into account sea conditions and traffic along the way.
“When we considered safety, we needed a system with even lower risk of collision,” said Tomoya Fukukawa, the Yanmar engineer in charge of R&D for the autonomous system. “We started looking for ideas from outside the field of marine vessels, such as robots used indoors. We adapted this to meet the requirements for auto-navigation and auto-docking systems.”
Working with a boat with twin props, twin rudders and a bow thruster, Yanmar developed a much faster and much more precise autonomous docking system. At first, it could dock the boat safely within a matter of yards; now, it’s within a matter of inches.
Yanmar developed what it calls a Real Time Kinematic (RTK) system to send correction signals to the vessel so it docks quickly. There is no need for any equipment on the dock; the boat does all the work itself. As a result, Yanmar cut the time from when the boat entered the port to the time it was safely docked from four minutes to 2 minutes, 30 seconds. At four minutes, the boat became an obstacle to other boats entering the same port.
Yanmar also used another system to build an electronic picture of the boat’s location underway, and to correct it automatically. It now can create a safe and accurate map using a combination of 3D-LIDAR and marine radar; it even can determine the location of buoys and navigate around them.
The company is continuing to work on the speed and safety of the autonomous vessel system, particularly in bad weather. The goal is to create a completely unmanned vessel that’s able to operate as an alternative to crewed ships in offshore maritime work. Read more:
