Furlong Vision: Advancing marine autonomy through a robust and cost-effective position referencing system

For a rapidly growing number of ships, increasing layers of redundancy in advanced navigation systems to accurately measure position and heading are vital to underpin mission-specific permissions/safety cases that address:

* Mature regulations for automated functions, including dynamic positioning (DP: used for maintaining fixed position, attitude and heading in off-shore or coastal environments)
* Emerging codes/standards for fully autonomous ship functions, e.g. building on DP to enable autonomous docking (ferries, cruise liners), or end-to-end operations of unmanned cargo vessels

The prevalent combination of cm-accurate state-of-the-art Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS, used for position sensing) and inertial sensors (used for orientation and attitude sensing) has vulnerabilities, requiring independent local position referencing to achieve redundancy.

However, no existing local position reference system can practically and cost-effectively deliver the robust performance, operational availability and long-term reliability to meet these rapidly evolving requirements, with any subsequent loss of redundancy causing significant operational losses and vessel downtime for operators.

In response, Furlong Sensing are developing a first-of-a-kind visual local positioning reference system for ships addressing a fleet of over 15,300 large vessels (\>300GWT), using only camera-based vision to:

1. Fix location and heading within a high-fidelity raw feature map
2. Perform integrity checks against the vessels' GNSS-inertial systems

Cross-cutting outputs strengthen the UK's overall position in pioneering sensing and autonomous systems technologies, applied to a new application area. Corresponding benefits accrue for vessel operators, the supply chain and wider UK public.