Development of fully autonomous marine vessels – a step towards an autonomous Marine ElectriCity

Research Project, 2020

The vehicle industry is advancing successfully in its strive towards fully electric and autonomous cars, trucks and busses. The ElectriCity initiative in Gothenburg has been an important arena for research and development on electrification of road vehicles according to the triple-helix model. The Revere infrastructure hosted by Chalmers has been an important enabler for cooperations on autonomous road vehicles (and lately also marine vehicles). These initiatives have resulted in a positive impact on new solutions and technologies towards sustainable road transports. This project proposal is a contribution to extend ElectriCity to the marine arena called Marine ElectriCity. Many stakeholders have during the last year discussed the importance of making ElectriCity more inclusive and add marine applications to it such as Älvsnabbare and the ferries in the Gothenburg archipelago.

The project applicants are all active in research areas which if they are combined will enable the realization of an autonomous Marine ElectriCity. The goal of the project is to develop navigation algorithms, ship motions and maneuvering models, test sensor techniques and evaluate remote sensing technologies, for sea transports. These will partly be tested under the umbrella of the established Revere initiative and infrastructure. The Revere Pilot boat will be used as the target case study vessel. It is already instrumented with several types of sensors which the researchers will use to explore their pros and cons with regards to a full autonomous small vessel. This “marine drone” will be made fully autonomous and tested for specific missions: safe navigation between two ports (shallow water, fixed obstacles), collision avoidance (between ships or other obstacles), and find the most transport-efficient route.
There is support (know-how) and expectations from several industry partners who want to contribute to the project such as ABB, the Volvo group (including Volvo Penta), Saab, RISE and some Swedish shipowners.The project applicants are all active in research areas which if they are combined will enable the realization of Marine ElectriCity. The goal of the project is to develop navigation algorithms, ship motions and maneuvering models, test sensor techniques and evaluate remote sensing technologies, for sea transports. These will be tested and be included in the Revere infrastructure which today emphasizes on road transport but thanks to the project it can be extended to sea transports; we call it Marine Revere in the project application. Positive synergy effects with road transports will be identified and taken care of. Model scale testing will be carried out using a fully electric 3-meter ship model which has been designed, instrumented and successfully used for testing and demonstration in two previous AoA Transport theme projects. This “marine drone” will be made fully autonomous and tested for specific missions: safe navigation between two ports (shallow water, fixed obstacles), collision avoidance (between ships), and find the most transport-efficient route (with regards to battery power).

There is support (know-how) and expectations from several industry partners who want to contribute to the project such as ABB, the Volvo group (including Volvo Penta), Saab, RISE and some Swedish shipowners.