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News Forbes: Autonomous Tug Finds Its Way Home

October 20, 2021

From Forbes:

The Odyssey has ended and the tugboat named Nellie Bly is back in Hamburg, Germany, where she started her mostly autonomous adventure of 1,027 miles earlier this month. The project, named Machine Odyssey, was launched by Sea Machines Robotics to demonstrate its SM300 autonomy system.

The system is named the SM300 because it contains 300 main processors. There’s a low level vessel controller, upper level autonomy computer and the processor powering the user interface. Functional safety is built into the low level controller driven and commanded by the autonomy computer which does the path planning.

For the most part, SM300 did all the work. According to Sea Machines, 96.7% of the trip was accomplished under fully autonomous control with SM300 successfully executing 31 collision-avoidance and traffic separation maneuvers. The tug was commanded by U.S. Coast Guard-licensed mariners remotely stationed 3,600 miles away in Boston.

Read this story on Forbes.com here.