Advancing Marine Systems: Ship Deck Equipment

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The mission of this research program is to increase safety on maritime vessels by advancing robotic deck-machinery. To increase operational availability and personnel welfare during maritime load transfers, the research program focuses on enabling technologies that can be used to compensate for the relative motion on all axes. Due to the relative motion between the bodies, dangerous challenges arise during cargo transfers while at sea and during launch and recovery operations. The program takes a systems level approach to the problem to make advances in: control algorithms; system modelling; machine vision; robotics; and mechanical design of robotic marine deck machinery. The proposed NSERC-DG will focus on motion compensation systems for ship mounted cranes and winches. The vision of the program is to autonomously & reliably launch, recover, or transfer any load or object from the air, sea surface, or another vessel to the host ship irrespective of weather conditions or relative motions. To progress the vision the proposed NSERC DG will focus on developing a novel sensory system to identify and track an arbitrary body in the ocean from a moving vessel. Due to the extreme dynamics of the environment, the proposed system will be a suite of sensors and will leverage our previous sensor fusion and signal prediction algorithms. The outcome of the work will result in a novel sensor suite and sensor fusion algorithm which has applications for maritime launch and recovery along with other autonomous vehicle uses. Additionally, the proposed research will use the outputs of the novel sensor system to provide inputs to crane-based Motion Compensation Systems (MCS). The proposed research will extend our previously developed MCS by removing several common assumptions such as rigid links, linear friction, and negligible crane-ship interaction. The work will also develop a novel real-time digital twin for a crane MCS which is suitable to be integrated into a real-time control loop. This digital twin will also be used to study and mitigate unwanted effects from disturbances and possible positive feedback loops from the crane-ship interactions. The proposed program will train 12 Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP): 3 PhD, 4 MSc and 5 BSc. Our research will help to improve the safety of the 5-billion-dollar Canadian marine industry, address the Canadian Government's commitment to improve marine safety, and provide technologies for the 35-billion-dollar national shipbuilding strategy for Canada. The HQP will also possess core skills to contribute to the Canadian marine market and the estimated 91,000 new jobs in the offshore power field over the next 20 years.