A team of partners are jointly-developing the world's first system of autonomous ships in a project called One Sea, which aims to enable fully remote-controlled vessels in the Baltic Sea for three-years’ time and achieve autonomous commercial maritime traffic by 2025.
Founded in 2016, the project is led by DIMECC (Digital, Internet, Materials & Engineering Co-Creation), with support from MacGregor , part of Cargotec, the association of Finnish Marine Industries and the Finnish funding agency TEKES.
Alexander Nürnberg, Senior Vice President, R&D and Technology, MacGregor, said: “The benefits of co-creation are obvious, software experts, together with systems and equipment experts, can improve efficiency and safety throughout the whole value chain.
“We in MacGregor started the transformation journey several years ago and are proceeding step-by-step towards autonomous equipment operations and eventually autonomous vessels.
“The steps we have already taken on this journey include the ability to have greater connectivity to equipment.
“This means that we can undertake performance monitoring and further enable condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance.”
The One Sea ecosystem is the latest in a series of collaborative initiatives by MacGregor and is one of many projects designed to create products and develop software and solutions to enable autonomous vessel traffic.
MacGregor has, for many years, also cooperated with the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi within the framework of the FIMECC Rebus programme, which is oriented towards adopting boundary-spanning business models that focus on a high-level cooperation between partners in a project and the development of new, innovative solutions.
Pasi Lehtonen, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Business Development and Strategy, MacGregor, added: ” MacGregor's vast experience in understanding container ship efficiency throughout its lifecycle enables us to widen developments for ultimately enabling the autonomous operation of cargo systems on board container vessels.”
