Better situational awareness for fleet managers
A Finnish technology company has designed a solution to give ship managers shoreside an unparalleled view of the surrounding area of all fleet vessels, including tugs and harbour vessels.
Groke Fleet by Groke Technologies builds on its predecessor the Groke Pro Situational Awareness System, to give more detailed information on which to better evaluate, enhance and control the navigational safety and efficiency of their vessels.
”While fleet managers can use Groke Fleet to follow the safety and efficiency of their vessels in congested or difficult seaways, the system really comes into its own in the event of a collision or similar incident,” said Juha Rokka, CEO, Groke Technologies.
“We see a future where situational awareness data will play a central role in ship and fleet management, but our technology also provides irrefutable evidence for accident investigators and insurers. It delivers greater transparency.”
Continuous monitoring
Mr Rokka said that unlike traditional fleet awareness solutions, GRoke Fleet isn’t just based on periodically updated AIS data.
The system captures positional data from onboard cameras, sensors and navigational systems to provide a continuous clear image of each vessels’ operational status, day or night.
Using machine vision and Cloud technology, Goke Fleet provides an accurate overview of the ships, generating insights and historical route information combined with high-resolution imagery from the ships’ Groke Pro cameras and sensors.
If there’s an incident or a near miss, the system automatically captures an image of the situation and creates a report, so reporting is no longer dependent on those onboard. Fleet managers can play back the route leading up to the event to see what actually happened.
Groke Pro’s blending feature combines images from day and thermal imaging cameras to provide a clear view of the vessel surroundings even during night-time operations or other low-visibility situations such as fog, heavy rain or highly reflective situations.
Mikko Mäkelä-Vaitilo, Groke Fleet product manager, said this makes a big difference to fleet management.
“It’s no longer just an AIS-type map view, but you can overlay high-resolution camera imagery. It picks up all the objects detected by the computer vision system, including non-AIS vessels,” he said.
