Re-Opening Invitation for Pilot Partners
This summer, Sea Machines has engaged commercial vessel operators in “real world” autonomous system trials. In these recent pilot trials, the company has installed the SMR-300 system on conventional 3rd party work boats, providing a quick upgrade from traditional to remote & autonomous operation. Trial customers are seeing the real value of autonomous control as operated in their specific on-water tasks and we receive the necessary feedback for continuous improvement. The trial system is installed as an “option”, meaning that full conventional control ability is retained with the newly installed autonomous control ready to engage or disengage at the flip of a switch.
Sea Machines at MIT MOOS-DAWG Demonstration
Sea Machines brought the test vessel STEADFAST into the Charles River on Wednesday for presentation and demonstration at MIT’s MOOS-DAWG Conference. The STEADFAST was by many orders of magnitude the largest and most powerful autonomous vessel or machine at the event and she was demonstrated alongside other great AUV & USV technology from MIT, Bluefin Robotics, Riptide, Boston Dynamics, Ocean Server, AMS, and more. Each team received 15 mins of demo time and the Sea Machines’ STEADFAST was remote operated from the dockside user interface with data comms over a 5ghz radio link, running a some waypoints and a survey grid while collecting side scan imagery of the river bottom.
There’s Vessel Autonomy but there’s also the Vessel Payload & Data
Sea Machines builds retrofit-ready advanced control systems for the purpose of upgrading conventional vessels to autonomous operation. Like a self-driving car, Sea Machines technology enable self-driving boats. This enables a new era of on-water operations and allows marine companies the opportunity to give their vessel operations a booster-shot of increased efficiency, productivity, capability, and safety. But wait, there’s more…the huge added value of data collection and remote payload control. Be it data from sonar, radar, surface video, or on-board weather station, we have started a program of continuous data collection during trials.