The proposed research is aimed at inventing, designing and prototyping a new unmanned marine vehicle for rescue operations of the man at sea. The new system is a robotized vessel that is launched automatically when the survey system reveals a man is falling outboard. The vehcile is able to resist to a violent water entry when released from the ship bridge and navigates auonomously towards the man at sea. Once the man is reached, the vehicle is able to host the man on board even if the man is not cooperating.
There are good reasons to develop such a new technology that can enhance in a significant manner the onboard safey.
Many of the cargo ships for goods, gas and oil transportation have a crew that in rough seas risks, in operations on external bridges, to fall into the sea. In these cases the rescue systems, in the current state of the art, are extremely ineffective with a high probability of losing a human life. These problems are common to cargo ship as welL as to passenger cruise ships. The system here proposed represents a breakthrough in the field of marine operation safety.
The innovation of the proposed solutions have great scientific and technological impact. These solutions open the chance to:
1. Integrate in a single platform the various proposed solutions and face the problem with a holistic approach, which guarantees on-board protection, rescue and support for crisis management and also benefits of innovative methods for privacy management;
2. Extend computer vision techniques and develop new Quasi-Artificial Intelligence algorithms for safety assessment, based on soft computing approaches, artificial intelligence and data fusion. The aim is to improve security conditions, both for passengers and shipboard personnel in the maritime field;
3. Develop an autonomous robotic marine vehicle prototype that, integrated with a man-over-sea recognition and tracking system, can be effectively used to rescue a man overboard;
4. Develop new AUV-ASV platforms engineered for rescue operations with a man-vehicle robotized interface;
5. Provide virtual training tools for passengers and staff on ship to illustrate security principles, providing applications for smartphones, tablets and smart TV with tips, advice and instructions about the fruition of ship services and emergency management;
6. Develop methods to process radar systems data, able to provide accurate and high-resolution images of the observed scenarios, sufficiently flexible so to be used in the various operational frameworks of the ship-environment.
In order to approach the commercialization phase, an engineering process is required. It involves all the main sub-components of the unmanned marine vehicle, as for instance the on-board protection system prototype and vision components.
Once the design part is successfully concluded, the engineering process involves radar methodologies through the integration of an ad-hoc designed software into an existing radar system, already under development and validation.
Engineering activities on the used calculation and vision components (i.e. resistance to atmospheric agents, temperature variations, mechanical vibrations, energy constraints, etc.), as well as extensive tests in different environmental conditions, precede the development phase of what achieved with behavior recognition systems and people/good tracking systems.
Drones demand a special attention. Indeed, the industrialization of the results requires a specific activity on the durability and reliability of these systems, as they are characterized by complex technologies, continuously put in standby. This industrialization process certainly passes through the use of redundant systems and health-control systems with continuous monitoring; but a careful analysis of the integration within the ship infrastructures (i.e. energy recharging stations, housings, automatisms in the launch and recovery systems) and technical-regulatory adaptation to the specific airworthiness requirements, related to the countries in which they are employed, are further cornerstones. An ad hoc maintenance system of the man overboard rescue systems is one of the key elements to guarantee the operability and industrial efficiency of the overall system and will probably require new and specific rules writing to be proposed in the appropriate international branches.