The Flemish government aims to boost its inland waterway infrastructure for sustainable freight transport. Despite this, there's been a decline in the Inland Surface Vessel (ISV) fleet over the past decade. To enhance competitiveness and sustainability, this project focuses on introducing next-gen ISVs, upgrading the current fleet, and reducing crew costs.
A primary focus, to enable a shift of freight transport to inland waterway transport (IWT), should be competitiveness (with attention to sustainability), and this can be accomplished by the:
Introduction of next generation ISV's;
Modernization of the current ISV fleet and;
Reduction of crew costs.
This project focusses on the first two points, by developing, implementing and experimentally validating technologies required to realize automated and sustainable inland shipping via:
Real-time hydrodynamic model identification;
Semantic maps for robust perception & localization;
Robust and optimal predictive navigation, maneuvering and control.
Project goal
In this project, we will develop and experimentally validate safe and robust perception, navigation and maneuvering control solutions for inland waterway (IWW) vessels.
This will enable IWW vessels to autonomously navigate inland waterways accounting for upcoming and proximate vessels and traffic rules, and maneuver in the proximity of fixed or slowly moving objects (e.g., locks, river banks, junctions for IWW vessels), in an energy and/or time efficient manner, while taking into account the presence of environmental disturbances such as wind, water currents, hydrodynamics interactions between vessels, banks and other objects.
Would you also like to participate in this project?
AUTOSHIP_IRVA is an industrial research project. We are looking for companies that want to be part of the user group and work with us to valorise the project.
Interested? Fill in the form below and we will contact you as soon as possible.
