Maritime Domain Awareness | Collision avoidance
- Partner
Bundeswehr
- Environment
Perimeter · Germany
- LAbel
Field use, Ukraine — ongoing
- Year
Field use, Ukraine — ongoing
The Challenge
Merchant vessels increasingly operate in waters where the navigation picture is unreliable. In the Baltic and the Eastern Mediterranean, GNSS is frequently jammed and spoofed, producing dropped or false positions. AIS coverage is incomplete: vessels switch off their transponders, spoof their position, or broadcast a false identity, and so do not appear in the collision picture. In the Strait of Malacca and the Singapore Strait, several hundred vessels a day transit channels less than two nautical miles wide.
Traffic volumes continue to rise while these conditions worsen. Jamming and spoofing, deactivated AIS, and intermittent connectivity leave the officer of the watch with an incomplete or incorrect picture at the moments that most require an accurate one.
Our Approach
The system produces a single local collision-avoidance picture on board, with no dependence on GNSS or a shore connection.
Q Collision Avoidance fuses the vessel's existing bridge sensors — radar, AIS, and EO/IR cameras — with COTS sensors added where coverage is insufficient. Hydris integrates and orchestrates every feed into one local maritime picture, retains contacts that AIS does not report, and calculates CPA/TCPA to identify developing close-quarters situations. On-board machine learning performs object detection and classification and provides decision support to the officer of the watch. HAT.tec's SCALE, the partner's mission-management system, presents the fused picture on the bridge, complementing the vessel's existing systems rather than replacing them.
The Result
The bridge has a consolidated picture of the near and immediate area, including the path ahead, that remains available when GNSS is denied and AIS is unavailable, and that requires no shore connection. Detection and classification run at the edge. Contacts not reported by AIS are detected and tracked, and the workload on the bridge team is reduced.
- Q-Box
Running Hydris v0.9 — sensor fusion and rule execution at the edge.
- Q-Seismic × 8
Ground vibration sensors covering the perimeter boundary.
"Reliable local situational awareness does not depend on GNSS or a shore connection. Built from a vessel's own sensors and COTS extensions and fused on board, the picture remains available when external signals are degraded. It also provides the basis for reduced-crew operations, remote fleet monitoring, and vessel autonomy."
- Onboard sensor fusion — radar, AIS, and EO/IR cameras combined with COTS sensors at the edge
- Offline operation — no dependence on GNSS or a shore connection
- Non-AIS detection — tracks contacts AIS does not report and surfaces CPA/TCPA
