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A rigorous sea trials program has demonstrated that a new autonomous navigation system can safely navigate unmanned vessels in real-time and in a real-life environment — without human intervention.
Patent pending Northstar developed by U.K.-based TPGroup was successfully used on different platforms and within a range of environments that include congested waterways and in open water. This level of technological maturity (technical readiness level 7) means that it can be developed for unmanned missions within the maritime sector.
The system delivers real-time optimum route management and collision avoidance for unmanned platforms, in any environment (including GPS-denied), without human control. It achieves this through fusing real-time and reference data to create a layered 3D synthetic environment, and optimizing paths within this digital environment – along with considering platform dynamics against user-defined measures of performance, time, cost and risk.
It continuously re-plans to reflect changing circumstances, allowing for additional factors that could influence the route pathing to be introduced at any time.
This advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning software has satisfied Phase 3 of a two-year MOD program, according to marinelink.com.
