Avikus, Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) Group's subsidiary specializing in autonomous navigation technologies for ships, partners with the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) to collaborate on real-life trials of autonomous ship technologies.
Article continues below
Kisun Chung, President and CEO of Hyundai Heavy Industries Holdings and Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering (KSOE), Do-hyeong Lim, CEO of Avikus, and John McDonald is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of ABS, attended the signing ceremony.
With the MOU signed, Avikus starts stage-by-stage demonstration tests for its various solutions including Hyundai Intelligent Navigation Assistant System (HiNAS): Hyundai Intelligence Berthing Assistance System (HiBAS): and Hyundai Intelligent Navigation Assistant System 2.0 (HiNAS2.0), in compliance with the ABS Guide for Autonomous and Remote Control Functions published in July 2021.
Through the tests, Avikus will be capable of obtaining each certificates by stage for its autonomous vessel technologies, while ABS will review the design, regulate testing procedures and verify the implementation for each stage based on the actual operation data of Avikus.
>From trials of the autonomous technologies in real-life conditions, the joint efforts from the two companies will be an important step in making maritime autonomous operations a practical reality. Lessons learnt from this collaboration will also contribute to the development and improvement of standards and regulations for autonomous technology and operations.
After the successful demonstration of the full autonomous cruising as the first in Korea in June 2021, Avikus plans to jointly demonstrate the autonomous shipping technology with ABS for a transoceanic voyage of a large-scale commercial vessel which is currently under development.
Avikus introduced a leisure boat equipped with the full autonomous navigation technology at CES 2022 and presented a future vision of the maritime mobility sector centering on autonomous vessel technology through simulated navigation applying the virtual reality technology. ■