Damen began researching the potential of commercial remote monitoring of ships and maritime systems three years ago. Toine Cleophas, Damen Manager Research, explains, “We were looking for a more generic system that was more flexible and in tune with the diversity of our clients’ requirements. Our clients want to have one single system that can handle all their data. This wasn’t available at that moment”.
Connecting on-board sensors to indicators on dashboards: Credit: Damen Shipyard Group
In September 2018, Damen posed their sensor mapping challenge at the Vodafone Ziggo/TNW IoT Challenge. Flicq was the winner of the challenge and successfully delivered a sensor mapping solution for Damen. Solco Reijnder, Damen Project Manager Innovation says, “The software tool we developed with Flicq can automatically gather and categorize data from every sensor on board a vessel”.
In the second phase Flicq smart sensors were deployed on Damen vessels to fill in data gaps. Flicq founder and CEO Karthik Rau explains “What makes them unique is that our sensors use edge intelligence. Battery life is longer, and you cut down the costs of bandwidth between the sensor and data center”.
More information on Damen’s challenge of connecting and mapping sensors on ships and the resulting maritime remote monitoring project can be found here.