smartYACHT

Smart Yacht Automated Control Technology

Aims

In yachting, there have been more and more accidents and incidents for years, sometimes with considerable personal injury and property damage. In addition to accidents, however, burglaries, vandalism and unauthorized commissioning as well as technical infirmities are major problems. Therefore, the primary goal of smartYACHT is to develop or minimize the development of a GNSS-based ship monitoring system in order to solve these problems.

Brief Description

Yachting in the Mediterranean attracts thousands of tourists every year. In Europe, boaters all over Europe will find suitable docking points for their trip through the wind and waves in charter companies in the Adriatic and Aegean Sea. In addition to marina operators, these charter companies are also a target group for the smartYACHT monitoring system, which was developed jointly by TeleConsult Austria and GeoMatica.

The project will develop and test an open platform that will allow marina operators and charter companies to integrate various sensors and ship monitoring technologies for their customers. The centerpiece is a mini-server with various interfaces for connecting both receivers for global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and sensors, for example in the fuel tank or on the bilge pump.

Ship owners, marina operators or charter companies can easily see whether fuel is being stolen from the yacht’s tank in the harbor, whether a fire breaks out or an unauthorized person enters a yacht. You can check whether the ship’s user illegally empties wastewater tanks into the sea, penetrates water or leaves the yacht within a defined area. The recipients of the corresponding alarm messages can check damage events in a graphical web interface and also initiate measures to remedy the problem.

But smartYACHT also offers amenities for the current skipper. Local hazard areas can be defined and accurate geopositioning allows the system to warn in time of these areas. For this purpose, a “virtual protective cover” around the yacht is calculated from position, speed and weather data and compared with digital nautical charts. Also logs of all maneuvers and possible groundings are visible to the owner.