How can autonomous water vehicles become a reality more than before and how can they maximize their potential? How can collisions with other water vehicles and the existing infrastructure be avoided? How can autonomous watercrafts maintain their stability even in strong currents and generally cope with difficult water conditions? All these questions will be addressed in the session and practical examples will be presented.

This session contains the following presentations:

Test center for maritime technologies Helgoland
Dipl.-Ing. Christopher Gaudig, DFKI - Robotics Innovation Centre
Maritime technologies face a gap between lab/basin testing and their final real-world use. In the 45m deep test field off of Helgoland, it is possible to test offshore materials, components and complete systems under realistic environmental conditions and with support from scientific experts.

Multi domain unmanned maritime systems
Dr.-Ing. Julien Hansen, ATLAS ELEKTRONIK GmbH
The presentation gives an insight into future requirements of a system of systems approach for unmanned maritime systems in multiple domains. Starting from a general view of first automated maritime systems - which already exist - up to real artificial intelligence - which is a dream of the future. How do these huge changes affect the products and the human operators?

Autonomous Electric Shipping in Metropolitan Areas
Tim Holzki, Technical University of Berlin
The research project “Autonomous Electric Shipping on Waterways in Metropolitan Areas” aims to develop an integrated transportation system for metropolitan areas based on small autonomous electric ships, to realize efficient and flexible transports on waterways, while lowering the overall transport emissions and facilitating individual mobility by reducing road congestion.