Monthly Archives: November 2019

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New frontiers in maritime autonomy

It is an exciting time in maritime autonomy especially in the UK.  The recent Shell XPrize competition stimulated the sector to show how much progress had been made in the ability to survey the deep ocean seabed. Our own Associate Professor Blair Thornton was an integral part of the team that came second. The winning team’s uncrewed surface vessel Sea-kit was built in Essex and recently crossed the  English channel autonomously .

Render of Mayflower 400 concept – courtesy of Dr Nicholls Lee, Whiskerstay

An even greater adventure will take place next year when a Plymouth based partnership will attempt to send a USV across the Atlantic to commemorate the Mayflower’s voyage to the America’s in 1620.  It is great to see such ambition. We are delighted to see double Ship Science graduate Dr Rachel Nicholls-Lee’s company Whiskerstay involved in the design of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship and its futuristic design.  The challenge has excited interest worldwide with Professor Stephen Turnock interviewed by NBC in USA about some of the challenges the Mayflower AS is expected to encounter.

ASV Fortitude under test at Timsbury Lake

Two groups of our final year Ship Science Group Design project students explored some of the challenges and developed our ASV Fortitude between 2014 and 2016. Currently being refitted Fortitude is now one of our group of ASV based in our Maritime Robotics Laboratory led by Dr Jon Downes alongside our ASV CCAT3.

University of Southampton C-Cat3

We see autonomy as central to many future developments in maritime engineering and our new look theme in Marine Engineering and Autonomy for our MSc and MEng pathway reflects this with modules such as our 15 credit Master’s module in SESS6072 led by Dr Nick Townsend on Maritime Robotics which was one of the first in the world when it launched 5 years ago.

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Maritime MASTERS rogue wave encounter with a floating offshore wind turbine

We were delighted to see one of our MSc Maritime Engineering Science student John Hayes present his impressive project on the response of a moored floating offshore wind turbine at the final of this year Maritime Masters competition.

He used our 138 m long Boldrewood wave/towing tank with 1:91 scale model of a spar buoy style floating wind turbine platform to investigate the level of motions that would be expected if it encountered a Rogue wave. This was just one of an impressive set of MSc projects finished this summer by our MSc class of 18/19

rogue wave encounters a floating wind turbine at model scale

In the video the rogue wave encounters a floating offshore wind turbine platform in the Boldrewood towing tank at the university of Southampton. A set of waves of appropriate amplitude and phase are generated from our 12 paddle wave maker so they coalesce as a short sequence of extreme amplitude waves at a precise location in the tank. In this case one of our MSc in Maritime Engineering Science had built a 1:91 scale model of a spar buoy style floating platform to measure the motion response with a realistic mooring arrangement. Motions were captured above and below the water using our 12 camera Qualisys system including the mooring line response.