York University

Purpose

Shipping operations in icy waters entail significant costs, complexity, and risk. This project intends to explore the feasibility and possible advantages of an autonomous surface shipping concept of operations for these conditions. The autonomous vessel will have an on-board sensor suite capable of sensing the immediate ice environment. The vessel will also have available additional small vehicles such as uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV) or uninhabited underwater vehicles (UUV) that could be deployed for remote sensing of the ice characteristics at some distance from the vessel. The combination of these sensors from autonomous agents working together will be used to build a map and path plan. These data will be transmitted, processed, and displayed to the operator at the Shore Control Centre (SCC). The remote operator will control the vessel and deploy the auxiliary vehicles to obtain the most informative data. The project focuses on humaninterface aspects of the concept.