As part of our VDES strategy Saab TransponderTech now introduces new applications for the shipping industry for high navigation accuracy, resilience and safety of navigation.
Shipborne tests starts in June 2021, in areas on the Swedish west coast and in the Gothenburg harbor.
Saab TransponderTech supplies prototypes of R6 VDES shipborne units and one R60 VDES base station to the project. On the bridge, the ship under test will receive two type of information blocks over the high speed VDES channels enabled by the Saab equipment. The Ship2ship Predictor and Shore2ship Network-RTK correction data.
The Ship2ship real-time Predictor is computed in the shipborne ECDIS and consists of the estimated future ship trajectory minutes ahead. Machine learning technology creates this Predictor and takes into account the important states of the ship, such as; position, speed, rudder angle, engine thrust, the ships behavior in the water, and other important parameters. The Predictor information is then sent to the R6 VDES transponder for broadcast to other ships in the vicinity. Predictor information payloads can consist of up to 650 bytes of data and be sent up to 1 Hz and uses the VDES high speed datalink denoted VDE-TER Link ID 19.
The Shore2ship GNSS Network-RTK corrections are computed ashore and then sent using an R60 VDES base station in a broadcast message to ships in the area. The corrections are sent at a rate of up to 1 Hz and uses VDES high speed datalink denoted VDE-TER Link ID 19. The ship R6 VDES system will route this information to a shipborne GNSS receiver which will give outstanding performance and resilience. GNSS Galileo signals from space will be combined with these Network RTK corrections from shore, to form the centimeter accuracy and resilience.
The consortium consist of the following partners: RISE – Developing the machine learning shipborne predictor and is also the project manager. TELKO – Supplying ECDIS and development of HMI and integration software. ANAVS – Developing the GNSS Galileo receiver. Lantmäteriet – Developing the Network RTK corrections. Stena Line – Supply one of the ships for the tests. Saab TransponderTech contributions is described above. The project has received funding from the European GNSS Agency under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No 870239.