”Operating our vessels in a safe and efficient manner is crucial in our line of business. With our new drone decision support system, we are pushing the boundaries for how technology can add value in terms of safety and optimisation of operations,” said Rune Keldsen, EVP and chief technology officer.

The drone system is connected to advanced navigation and includes a charging station, lidars, a thermographic sensor and a high definition RGB camera. The drone will fly 120 meters up in the air, live streaming in real-time to the captain on the bridge. A neural network is used to post-process the streamed video and calculate the distance between objects around the vessel. The drone will accurately provide the captain with vital input, acting as the captain’s eye in the sky during port departures and arrivals, as well as navigation in narrow waters.

While today’s decisions are based on human observations and GPS, it is anticipated that the drone will function as a decision-support system.

Looking into the future, the drone system will also be able to act as an extra set of hands when a person is in distress or if a fire breaks out onboard a ship. If a person falls overboard, the drone can fly back and locate the person using thermal and ordinary cameras.

Mads Bentzen Billesø, head of Innovation and Partnerships at DFDS, explained: “Using drone technology to support operations onboard our ships has been an area we have been investigating with great interest. We are proud of this collaboration which will push large-scale utilisation of drones to solve a number of tasks. This will in time result in improved efficiency and, more importantly, improved safety onboard our ferries.”

The development of this new technology has been supported by the Danish Maritime Fund and ShippingLab/Innovation Fund Denmark.