SAFESHIP (Situational Awareness and Forecasting Encounters for Sailing Harbors by Intelligent Planning)

Safe piloting in busy ports by autonomous USVs is a highly challenging problem. SAFESHIP will provide a fully autonomous harbor piloting solution by judiciously combining robust perception and sensor fusion with an innovative constrained path planner and a mature threat detection and alerting system which will completely replace the current manned solutions. Safe operation will be achieved using SSCI’s mature performance evaluation tool to provide and evaluate safety metrics at the design stage and justify autonomous decisions to a remote operator. SAFESHIP path planning will be compliant with COLREGS rules for operation in ports, while the resulting software will be compliant with UMMA and MOSA standards. SSCI has assembled a strong team to support the design, data collection, performance evaluation and transition of the SAFESHIP to operational platforms of interest by the Navy.