A new partnership led by Grimaldi – a major international maritime service operator groups based in Naples with a fleet of 130 ships owned, 10 under construction and 10 in the design phase will foster the adoption of GNSS technologies for the automation of vessels. GSAB – Grimaldi Satellite Assisted Berthing is a premiere and flagship project, awarded by ESA – NAVISP 2 program to an international consortium led by Grimaldi in partnership with Kongsberg (Norway) and Radiolabs targeting the assisted berthing operations with big vessels as the PCTC – Pure Car & Truck Carriers.
Radiolabs, co-prime contractor of GSAB, will be responsible of the design, execution and validation of the whole system in operating conditions leveraging on a multi-year know how for high integrity high accuracy positioning with GNSS for trains and car applications. Test campaign will be carried out for the first time with a large and modern ro-ro ship made available by Grimaldi as a step-forward respect to the small-size vessels already used. An accurate and reliable test bed with a reference ground truth will be implemented by Radiolabs to evaluate the performance of the technologies on board the ship.
GSAB – a premiere project for introducing latest innovations on satellite-based multi-sensor technologies will contribute to improve the efficiency of manoeuvres in the port and to increase the safety while reducing CO2 emissions in line with the strategy of a greener and safer maritime transport. The first phase is dedicated to the design of the equipments and related laboratory tests and pre-installation of the system on board the ship. The second phase will take place in the port of Antwerp at the Grimaldi AET terminal in real operational conditions.
GSAB will also contribute to the development of standardised multi-modal GNSS platforms for rail, car and ship berthing autonomous operations.
