Some 8,000 inland navigation vessels currently transport goods on Europe’s rivers and canals. The first of these is now operating by remote control. Duisburg is a nationwide hub for autonomous inland navigation and home to DST, a development centre for marine technology and transport systems that heads up the project “FernBin” for remotely controlled, coordinated inland navigation.
DST will travel to XPONENTIAL Europe with “heavy luggage”: ELLA measuring 15 LOA, which is currently being tested in autonomous navigation, will be on show at the trade fair in Düsseldorf from 18 to 20 February 2025.
Standing at the bridge Stephan Schweig looks as if he was aboard a starship. A cone-shaped 360° projection system with a diameter of 8 metres is suspended from the ceiling of the “VeLABi” (Test and Performance Centre Autonomous Inland Navigation Vessels). 19 overhead projectors show the way to the research assistant at the DST. Today’s navigation is on home turf: the Vincke canal, which connects the Rhine with the Duisburg Ruhrort free port area. This is a test track owned by the duisport Group operating Europe’s biggest inland port. DST regularly uses the Vincke canal for test trials.
By now, Stephan Schweig knows the 105 m “Ernst Kramer” he is manoeuvring virtually inside out. The real cargo ship, built in Bodenwerder in 1974, was made available and correspondingly “tuned” by shipping company Rhenus PartnerShip as a research vessel for the FernBin project. Schweig refers to this as a retrofit – which is important because it shows that even existing inland navigation vessels – most of them between 30 and 50 years old – are suitable for remote control. The “Ernst Kramer” was retrofitted accordingly: analogue processes were replaced to allow the pilot to remotely access the main engine, rudder, bow thruster as well as radio and radar systems. Today, the vessel features a variety of cameras, Lidar sensors, high-precision GNSS-antennas and the respective mobile communications technology for a fast, safe and redundant transmission of large data volumes. All this serves to transmit the on-board navigation and control data. This includes not only the operating data of the engines and rudder systems but also that of the two radar systems and the electronic nautical chart display including the data generated by the navigation communication system AIS. This data is processed and displayed in real time on the remote helm stand.
To ensure safe, remotely controlled navigation, state-of-the-art and proven driver assistance systems are used, proprietary assistance systems developed, and existing ones are enhanced. One of them being the ArgoTrackPilot by Argonics GmbH. This company from Stuttgart-Vaihingen is a market leader “made in Germany” in the field of automated track piloting. With the ArgoTrackPilot, which is now already embedded in a number of inland vessels, these vessels remain on track following a pre-set route.