Grimaldi Satellite Assisted Berthing
GSAB-2 is the follow up phase of the GSAB flagship project awarded by the European Space Agency (ESA) on September 2022 and funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) within the Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP) to develop and validate the first assisted guidance system with satellite technology for docking manoeuvres of large PCTC (Pure Car & Truck Carrier) vessels.
GSAB-2 represents a fundamental step forward to develop and validate the assisted & autonomous shipping technologies necessary to speeding-up the transition towards the next generation of autonomous ships. It will be exploiting the recent autonomous driving technologies developed for the car and train automation to improve the efficiency of manoeuvres in port, increasing the safety and to reducing CO2 emissions, in line with the Grimaldi Group’s strategy towards a greener and safer maritime transport.
The starting point is the Autonomy Level 2 as defined by Lloyd’s Register meaning that actions at ship level are taken by a human operator on board the vessel assisted by decision support tools. GSAB-2 will study the prerequisites for reaching the Autonomy Level 3, where decisions and actions at ship level are performed autonomously with human supervision.
Radiolabs, partner of the GSAB-2 project – coordinated by Grimaldi Group company Grimaldi Deep Sea with Kongsberg, based in Norway and RINA Services – will take care of the design, execution and validation of the system in real-world operating conditions. Furthermore, Radiolabs will contribute with the latest innovations on satellite-based multi-sensor technologies, for high accuracy and integrity positioning in synergy with the automotive and rail sector that are leading the connected and autonomous driving applications. In fact similarly to those applications, the Autonomy Level 3 requires a precise and trustable control of the speed and positioning during final approach to the pier to avoid collisions with other elements of the docks and other vessels.
Looking forward, the Position, Velocity and Attitude estimation of the vessel must also be resilient against possible jammers, meaconing and spoofing attacks. Since this topic is important also for the Rail applications, Radiolabs is customising a solution – derived from the Rail context – complementary to the GSAB-2 project. This system consists of a 4-elements array antenna with a fully coherent Digital Beam Processing unit to estimate the heading, pitch, and roll of the vessel in case GNSS signals are jammed Use of a GNSS Digital Beamforming Platform for an Assisted Berthing System | Technical Program – Pacific PNT 2024 (ion.org)
