UKESNC winner 2008
The winners of the UKESNC 2008 were Peter Hall and Christine Edwards of Sci-Tech Systems with a Person Over Board System. Peter and Christine were also the winners of the 2008 Overall ESNC Winner and the 2008 European GNSS Supervisory Authority Special Topic Winner.
The thought behind the idea
It is recognised that if a person falls into cold water, their survival time is very short. There is a concentrated focus on safety issues in the maritime world, as demonstrated by the introduction of the Global Maritime Distress Safety System (GMDSS). This is an internationally agreed set of safety procedures, types of equipment, and communications protocols used to increase safety and aid rescue.
This person-over-board (POB) project aims to exploit a recognised gap in the commercial and marine leisure markets, by combining a crew overboard alarm and a real-time tracking and retrieval system. There are two components to this project, the device worn by the crew and the fixed ship unit.
The crew unit is a small electronics device worn by each crewmember, either built in to a lifejacket or with its own float and tether system. The ship unit is seen as add-on electronics mounted permanently on board the boat, compatible and interfacing with existing electronic equipment.
Most modern vessels have a GNSS receiver or plotter, a cockpit-mounted GNSS repeater, and a VHF radio. The object of this project is to extend the use of this existing technology without compromising its familiar functionality. The shipboard unit will serve as the medium between the existing on-board GPS receiver and the cockpit repeater.
If a crewmember falls overboard, immersion in water activates the personal crew device (POB); the ship unit logs the position and initiates an audio and visual alarm. The crew unit then obtains a GNSS fix, using aided start-up from the ship if necessary, and transmits its position at regular intervals. The ship unit starts tracking the POB position and generating instructions for recovery in the form of a heading and distance to the casualty. Should the parent vessel go out of range, the ship unit can detect the loss of POB signal and switch to calculating the expected position using dead reckoning from its previously logged positions. This system is also capable of dealing with multiple casualties in the water.
The future evolution of this unit:
- The ship unit can also function as a position monitor, raising an alarm if a vessel moves unexpectedly.
- The ship unit can feed an alarm directly into the existing emergency GMDSS system.
- As the crew and ship units are based on the same hardware, the unit can evolve into a portable tracking unit with a wide range of applications.
- The fixed and portable units can work towards implementing the features of the SAR/Galileo system as they become available.