The INS will be placed with THURN’s Marine Robotics and Autonomy Product Development team, based in the Acle office on the edge of the Norfolk Broads. The SBG system will be a key component in the further development of THURN’s range of rotocopter-drone and USV-carried integrated survey systems for nearshore, port, river and lake applications. The first deployments will be on THURN’s OceanAlpha (Wan Chai, Hong Kong) SL40 Autonomous survey boat, and further deployments are planned with sonar systems hung from THURN’s DJI M600Pro hex-copter drone equipped with SPH Engineering’s (Riga, Latvia) UgCS SkyHub and TrueTerrainFollowing (TTF) system.
Tom Hiller, General manager at THURN, stated “The Ellipse-D system has been chosen for its high level of performance in a very compact form factor, ideal for our small unmanned vessels and airborne autonomous platforms. SBG’s long experience and understanding of the marine sector, embodied in their extended Kalman filter technology, should ensure the INS will perform well in the complex environments that THURN’s customers encounter daily. We’ll be putting this first system through some tough tests and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.”
Swathe Services Managing Director, James Williams, commented ‘The Thurn Group is an established technology company representing some great 1st class manufacturers and with the purchase of the new Ellipse V3, it will allow them to develop their own technology solutions further cost effectively and with superior performance.’