Marine Navigation

Advanced Navigation has a range of MEMS and fibre-optic gyroscope (FOG) based inertial navigation systems (INS) covering a range of performance grades that make them suitable for various maritime applications, including navigating crewed vessels and autonomous uncrewed surface vessels (USV) and hydrographic survey.

Boreas DFOG products feature gyroscompassing capability that enable them to rapidly establish heading even in conditions of high dynamic motion, such as heave and listing, without requiring GNSS or magnetometers. The reliability of data from the Boreas system provides very high levels of confidence in determining a relative or absolute position of a vehicle or vessel. Additionally, Boreas is much less affected by sources of magnetic interference, which are common to marine surface vessels.

Advanced Navigation products are extremely compact and light for easier integration.

All Advanced Navigation products that support GNSS aided navigation, the systems come standard with multi-frequency and multi-constellation support for RTK to meet the most demanding requirements.

Marine navigation systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated as technology for sea applications improves. This means more accurate heading and position that can integrate GNSS for absolute position, and north seeking fibre-optic gyro-compassing for non-magnetic heading.

Simple integration is increasingly important, as is SWaP-C, and the ability for navigational devices to be adopted across varying vessel types and applications. Advanced Navigation products feature a common API to enable them to be readily integrated and communicate with your other systems, such as visual data capture and vehicle control modules. Because the messaging protocol is standard across products, you can change the performance grade of the navigation system without additional engineering.

Knowing exactly where you are as a surface vessel is paramount to safe and efficient sailing, with Advanced Navigation products covering the spectrum of marine navigation applications.

Competitive yacht racing, such as the America’s Cup, attracts cutting edge sailing technology as much as it does sponsorships and endorsements. As yachting relies on the elements, the boat and how well the crew set sail and navigate, teams must look to find and extract the tiniest of advantages over their adversaries in a very closely competitive sport. To gain advantage includes gaining a thorough understanding of yacht dynamics in all manner of conditions.

Using data from a high-accuracy INS with a high update rate mounted in the yacht and data from other vessel systems gives team managers and technicians the ability to very thoroughly analyze boating performance. Using a GNSS MEMS INS provides substantial data for list, velocity, heave, pitch and heading that can be used both in real-time but in analysis when testing new equipment, such as keels and sails.

Support vessels, such as high-speed foils, to the racing yachts are often fitted with a high grade MEMS GNSS INS. Accurate and reliable navigation, even in heavy swells, helps support crews rapidly and accurately reach the yacht in the event of an emergency or other need.

Detailed seabed maps are vital to laying of telecommunications infrastructure that connect different regions of the world and the installation of ocean based energy stations and rigs. Knowing the contour and makeup of the seabed strata is critical to safe and reliable cabling, pipelines, footings and moorings. Not only by mapping its shape but also gaining understanding of how the seabed changes over time and how it affects oceans, lifeforms and habitats, even climate. The Seabed 2030 project is testament to this need, aiming to amalgamate all available bathymetric data to produce a definitive map of the world’s ocean floor by 2030.

Hydrography and bathymetry solutions typically use a host of differing technologies to achieve the required results. Much of this is to do where the survey is being performed, depth of water and if the survey can be carried out from a surface vessel using towfish or similar sensor package. Accurate georeferencing of the seabed to absolute position is critical in any surveying application, however, due to underwater being fully denied of GNSS signals and the use of magnetic heading often difficult, different navigation technologies may be required, such as Boreas DFOG and high performance Subsonus USBL systems.