A robot life preserver goes to work in the Greek refugee crisis

The remote-controlled Emily robot can reach struggling swimmers far faster than a lifeguard.

From Wired by Matt Simon

The European refugee crisis isn’t so much a crisis as it is a catastrophe.
Fleeing violence in Africa and the Middle East, particularly Syria, more than a million migrants crossed by sea into Europe in 2015.
Almost 4,000 of them lost their lives in the journey.
The sea crossings can be especially dire, as leaky, unsafe boats capsize or break apart in rough water.
In Greece the danger has proven massive, particularly off the island of Lesvos, which takes in an average of 2,000 refugees daily.

Every day around Lesvos the Coast Guard must rescue boats that have capsized, run out of fuel, or simply broken down.
Which is why the Coast Guard invited a team from Texas A&M University’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue to launch a pilot project this week for a very special robot—Emily, the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard.

Think of Emily as a life preserver melded with a jet ski. It’s about four feet long and shaped like a pickle spear.
An operator remotely controls the robot, tethered to a rope up to 2,000 feet long, to migrants struggling at sea.
The victims take hold of the buoyant bot and a rescuer reels the line in.
Quadcopter drones called Fotokites, themselves tethered on 30-foot ropes near the operators, pipe back an overhead view.

In fact, NGOs on the island had already been thinking about using UAVs to aid rescue efforts, says Robin Murphy, the Texas A&M roboticist running the project.
“In the meantime we were saying, ‘You’re talking about people drowning,'” Murphy says.
“There’s this new technology, Emily, these robots that are life preservers.”
UAVs turn out to run afoul of Greek aviation regulations anyway—and a tethered quadcopter isn’t considered a UAV.
Combined with Emily, the drones make for a powerful (and legal) way to spot and save people in the water.

It's deployable from both boat and land and hit speeds of 20 mph

At a constant full speed of 20 mph, the robot has enough juice for 20 minutes at sea, plenty of time to make several trips to fetch victims—especially since it only needs to propel itself on the outbound leg.
And it’s buoyant enough to hold five people at once.
“We can run the boat out there and we can start plucking people that can actually hold on and get them out of the way,” says John Sims, a fire captain formerly of the US Coast Guard, who’s operating the robots for the deployment.
“And then the live lifeguard can do his job and get out there to get the unconscious people.”

That’s the plan, anyway. Emily has never faced a test like this.
The robot has helped struggling swimmers here in there in America, but deploying it in Greece is a tremendous scale-up.
“One has to be a little bit careful,” says M. Ani Hsieh, co-chair of the Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics committee at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
“What many people who work with rescue robots will tell you is a lot of things start with good intentions.”
You never really know what the best use is for a robot “until you actually have people on the ground and see things being tested.”
It may well be, for instance, that Emily is more useful for plucking a single swimmer out of the water instead of big groups.

The buoyant bot can hold around 5 people. 

And as with any interaction between humans and increasingly sophisticated robots, the pilot project has risks.
Its designers know, for example, that Emily’s long tether could get tangled in the propeller of a Coast Guard boat.
(Those kinds of concerns led the Coast Guard to prohibit the 81 NGOs on Lesvos from operating their own boats without specific permission.)

But the important distinction here is the team has the Coast Guard’s blessing.
Coordination among NGOs, independent volunteers, and the Greek government has been lousy on Lesvos, says Boris Cheshirkov, spokesman on Lesvos for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The Texas A&M roboticists hope to avoid those conflicts.
“As long as it’s coordinated with the government,” Cheshirkov says, “it can only be a welcome addition to the response.”
The Emily team is confident enough in the robot’s abilities that it’s already raising funds to leave one of the robots behind in Greece.
The machine can’t stop war or uncapsize boats, but but any tool that helps in the fight against catastrophe is a good one.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog :  A wintry sea seems a safer bet than life at home for refugees / Migrants can't be left to die in the seas of Europe /SAR crisis in the Mediterranean – commercial vessels rescue thousands / The millionaires who rescue people at sea / European Union authorizes military action against people smugglers / Lampedusa, the Italian Island thousands are dying to reach

NZ Linz update in the GeoGarage platform

  7 nautical raster charts updated

see GeoGarage News

Satellite images are source for first-of-its-kind charts of Alaska's Yukon River

New depths are overlaid on an existing Yukon River electronic navigational chart,

demonstrating the river's changing shoreline.

From NOAA

Coast Survey has issued provisional charts for barge operators and others traversing Alaska's challenging Yukon River, relying solely on satellite images to create the electronic navigational charts that only display shoreline and shoals (shallow areas).
The ENCs, which display no depth soundings, will give the mariners annually updated information to help their navigation along the changeable river.

During a virtual meeting on January 6 with barge operators who requested NOAA's charting assistance, Andrew Kampia, the cartographer in charge of the project explained, “You may hear me refer to them as an experiment because we have not created or released a navigational product like this before.”
“The Yukon was literally uncharted,” Kampia told the group. “After some analysis and brainstorming, we decided to create a prototype ENC using only satellite data. This is unprecedented.”

Yukon River with Google imagery (Terrametrics provider)

overlayed with the GeoGarage RNC platform

Yukon River with Google Maps 

overlayed with the GeoGarage RNC platform

Coast Survey is not able to provide contemporary surveys to acquire data for charting the length of the river, as funding, survey vessel availability, remoteness, and small windows of opportunity to survey are major obstacles.
Satellite-derived bathymetry from two navigation seasons between July 2014 and October 2015 helps to fill the void of contemporary data for Western Alaska.
The charts will help to address the concerns of the local barge industry that supplies goods and services to western Alaska and who have had to deal with a lack of data inshore of the 12-foot contour.
(The average draft of vessels transiting up river for village deliveries is four to six feet.)
The new Yukon River provisional ENCs US4AK98M, US4AK99M, and US4AK00M offer 1:90,000 scale coverage that spans the entrance to the Yukon River, including Apoon Pass to Kotlik, and continues east to Russian Mission.

Satellite-derived bathymetry uses satellite images and histograms and performs some logarithmic calculations that can sometimes estimate depths in relatively shallow areas.
Or, as in the case of the Yukon, satellite-derived bathymetry can estimate shoals, which are displayed on the Yukon ENCs as obstruction areas.
Unlike traditional hydrography, however, satellite-derived bathymetry doesn’t provide exact depth measurements or tidal data at the time the satellite imagery was taken.
“Shoreline depictions are derived from automated processing of satellite imagery,” Kampia said.
“We felt pretty confident in the position of the shoreline, but it is below our customary standards, so we added notes to the ENCs.”

These screenshots show the western entrance to the Yukon River on ENC US4AK98M with zoom

Entrance of Yukon River with Google imagery (Terrametrics provider)

overlayed with the GeoGarage RNC platform

Entrance of Yukon River with Google Maps 

overlayed with the GeoGarage RNC platform

Coast Survey has provided two special notes for the Yukon River ENCs:

WARNING PROVISIONAL ENC
This ENC was constructed using the best data available. All or much of the shoreline, depths and shoals within this ENC are below customary quality, are not corrected for tides, nor based on a known sounding datum. All or much of the charted detail is highly changeable. Navigators should use this ENC with extreme caution.
SATELLITE DERIVED DEPTHS
Shoreline, depths, and obstruction areas within the area of this ENC are derived from satellite imagery from 2015. Their vertical accuracy is typically ± 2m. Uncharted dangers may exist.

Since the river is in a constant state of change, Coast Survey will use satellite images after the spring thaws to make annual updates.
Late this spring, a satellite-derived bathymetry analyst will examine the first satellite images after the Yukon thaws and is navigable.
The Landsat 8 images are available every 16 days as the satellite makes it trip around the globe, so the first usable images may not be available until May or June.
After turning the images into shoreline and bathymetric updates, updated ENCs will be issued in early July – or earlier if possible.
“We would like to routinize and improve this process over the coming years based on our analyses,” Kampia said.
“We hope to build on these successes and use these solutions in areas other than the Yukon, where traditional surveys aren’t able to provide the charts that navigators need.”
The Office of Coast Survey recently issued the revised U.S. Arctic Nautical Charting Plan, but agency officials stress that it is a “living document,” needing adjustments as priorities change.
Hydrographic and cartographic experts will travel to Alaska in March to ask the state’s maritime industry for input that will help future surveying and charting activities for the State.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Avoiding rock bottom: How Landsat aids nautical charting / Keeping false pass true / Finding hidden shoals on the North Slope

Revealed: how giant icebergs breathe life into remote oceans

Iceberg B-15T still adrift
Giant icebergs leave surprising green plumes of carbon sequestration in their wakes

NASA

From The Conversation by Grant Bigg

As giant icebergs bob across the open seas they leave behind a trail of nutrient-rich meltwater, sparking new life in the world’s remotest and least hospitable oceans.
This in turn means more carbon is taken from the atmosphere and stored below the waves.
Massive icebergs may be a symptom of climate change – but they can also help keep it in check.
“Giant” icebergs are technically those at least 18km in length.
At any one time several dozen are afloat in the Southern Ocean, and individually they can survive for up to a decade.
They make up roughly half of the ice discharged from Antarctica, so around 1000km³ per year – equivalent to the annual flow of the Congo River.
However these icebergs come in fits and starts.
Some years hardly any break off, whereas five of the biggest icebergs recorded in the satellite era broke off into the Southern Ocean during 1999-2003.
So a big iceberg year can have a huge impact.
In fact, during previous ice ages huge “iceberg armadas” from Northern Hemisphere ice sheets are believed to have redirected the Gulf Stream – albeit thanks to melting on a slightly larger scale.
It’s clear then that meltwater from giant icebergs can directly impact circulation of the Southern Ocean, and the climate above it.
However, in a recent paper in Nature Geoscience, colleagues at the University of Sheffield and I have shown there is also a significant impact on the carbon sink, and hence the rate of exchange of CO₂ between the ocean and atmosphere.

 Antarctica's giant icebergs are helping fight climate change

Why icebergs mean oceans store more carbon

Here’s how it works: as Antarctic ice sheets slowly slide towards the ocean they bump along the continent’s bedrock, picking up iron and other nutrients which become imprisoned within the ice.
When icebergs melt they release these chemicals into the sea.
As icebergs are essentially freshwater, their water is buoyant and ascends to the ocean surface, where the iron and nutrients are utilised by phytoplankton – tiny plant-like organisms at the bottom of the marine food web.
This makes a big difference in the Southern Ocean, where limited dissolved iron – important for cell growth – restricts productivity despite an abundance of nitrate.
Melting icebergs release iron in a bio-available form, so encourage phytoplankton growth, photosynthesis, and the draw-down of atmospheric CO₂.

 Chlorophyll – a direct product of phytoplankton photosynthesis – 

shows life blossoming for hundreds of kilometres around this giant iceberg. 

Duprat et al / Nature

Giant icebergs are especially important as we found the increase in productivity from their meltwater could be as much as a factor of ten above background levels, and extend hundreds of kilometres away from the melting iceberg, both upstream and downstream.
At fixed points, the effect could last for up to a month after passage of an iceberg.
This is a far larger impact on the surrounding ocean than the limited previous observational studies had found, and could provide as much as 10-20% of the net carbon export into the deep waters of the Southern Ocean.

Giant icebergs could hold back global warming

We’ve only accurately tracked giant icebergs since the 1980s so it’s difficult to know exactly what the future holds.
However, the increasing amounts of ice discharged from Antarctica in recent decades, combined with likely acceleration of change under global warming, suggests we’ll see more giant icebergs in future. If this were so, the enhanced productivity of the Southern Ocean, taking more CO₂ from the atmosphere, will act as a small check on global warming.
What of the Arctic?
Icebergs are abundant in parts of the northern oceans, as the Titanic tragedy showed.
However, those calved from Greenland are only very rarely more than a kilometre or so long, and are almost never “giants".
The North Atlantic also has plenty of iron, mostly thanks to Saharan dust carried there in the atmosphere.
The Arctic and North Atlantic are therefore missing key ingredients for a strong biological response to iceberg meltwater.
However, large amounts of freshwater entering the North Atlantic could affect the meridional overturning circulation, a current which sends the Gulf Stream northwards along the surface while cooler, deeper water moves southwards.
More icebergs from Greenland, or further ice melting due to global warming, may help slow this current and check climate change.
Fortunately, the Northern Hemisphere no longer has the large ice sheets with a history of instability that could cause this sort of “Day After Tomorrow” scenario.
So if any giant icebergs are going to help slow climate change they will likely come from Antarctica, one of global warming’s most symbolic places.

Links :

• CarbonBrief : Giant icebergs boost Southern Ocean carbon storage, says study

Inmarsat’s maritime vision

The maritime industry is changing.

Watch our short video to hear about Inmarsat’s maritime vision in supporting the data revolution and setting a new standard in communications at sea.

From Maritime Executive by Wendy Laursen

Early this month, Inmarsat confirmed that global commercial service introduction has been achieved for its new Global Xpress (GX) constellation.
The constellation consists of three Ka-band, high-speed mobile broadband communications satellites.

GX is the first high-speed broadband network to span the world, and Inmarsat says that its maritime functionality, Fleet Xpress, will make video a viable proposition for remote assistance and diagnostics and will enable advanced applications such as telemedicine and video surveillance.
But the potential for very high availability has many ship management and safety applications and could ultimately include the potential for the safe deployment of unmanned vessels.

Purposely designed for mobility, the new GX system will provide a continuous, consistent service as traffic is handed seamlessly across each spot beam and from one satellite to another.
Global Xpress operates in the Ka-band, but, combined with the Inmarsat L-band network it is anticipated to deliver 99.9 percent overall network availability.

In announcing the launch of the company’s third GX satellite last year, Rupert Pearce, CEO of Inmarsat, said: “We have been working towards this day ever since we announced plans to create the Global Xpress constellation in 2010…
Global Xpress will deliver broadband speeds that are an order of magnitude faster than our fourth generation (I-4) constellation, to customers on the move on land, at sea and in the air, globally.

“As such, the GX fleet will offer a host of new opportunities for both our existing and new customers to significantly enhance their connectivity capabilities and to deploy bandwidth-hungry applications and solutions efficiently and effectively, even in the remotest and most inaccessible parts of the world. Global Xpress is, therefore, an important enabler for continued growth in global mobile broadband – it is the ‘Internet of Everywhere.”

In a series of videos Inmarsat will be taking you on a transformational connectivity journey

that is set to change the way we live our lives – watch the trailer to find out more.

The Power of Availability

New communication capabilities that have very high availability will be an enabler for the real-time transfer of significant amounts data from ship to shore and vice versa, says DNV GL in its 2015 position paper Ship Connectivity.

Potential applications include condition monitoring, remote maintenance, decision support tools and energy optimization such as those offered by engine manufacturers and system integrators, such as Rolls Royce, Wärtsila and Marorka.
In the case of Marorka, the company’s on board system can log, track, and analyse more than 500 data sources, including fuel consumption, speed, weather and draft.

The E.U. and the IMO are introducing regulations for monitoring, reporting and verification of emissions, and new satellite communications capabilities could aid in meeting these requirements by providing reliable, transparent data without unnecessary burdening ships’ crew.

Another potential environmental application would be using vessels as sailing weather stations, says DNV GL. (see WMO)
“If an advanced weather station is fitted on a vessel, relevant data may be transmitted regularly to an onshore data centre, for further analysis or data sharing.
If many vessels participate, a network with continuous feeds of weather data from many locations would be created.
This could become a meteorological Big Data application in which the collated data could be used to calibrate weather models and improve weather forecasts.”

Safety applications include the live monitoring of critical systems, says DNV GL.
This could determine the integrity and status of various safety systems and alert shoreside personnel if, for example, fire detectors are offline, watertight doors are kept open too often or if ECDIS is using an obsolete version of maps.

During emergencies, shore parties could benefit from additional data being transferred live from the vessel.
They could keep informed of the status of the navigation system and safety systems (e.g. fire and flooding status), stability information from the vessel’s loading computer and possibly video streams from strategic positions on board the vessel.
DNV GL also proposes VDR-in-the-cloud as a way of sending vessel black box data to shore on a regular basis in case the voyage data recorder is not found after an accident.

Remote control and autonomy

Ultimately, the increased reliability and capacity of data transfer could enable the controlling of ship functions from shore.
“Remote control of vessel functions will have intensive requirements regarding the communication link to the vessel,” says DNV GL.
“Firstly, the connection needs broadband in order to be able to transfer sufficient amount of information to the onshore operator and back to the vessel. The bandwidth requirements for the forward link will be smaller as it will be mainly control commands from pilot to vessel.
“Secondly, as loss of communication will result in loss of ability to control the vessel, the communication system must be highly reliable. Furthermore, the connection should have low latency to avoid an introduced lag impeding reaction times, which may be critical for adequate response times.”

The provision of a robust and dependable communication link could be provided by redundancy and diversity where several independent communication systems are used.
Backing up a satellite connection with a terrestrial connection, such as 3G or 4G, is another alternative.
If communication is lost, a fail-safe logic could be applied, so that the autonomous system configures the vessel to the safest possible state until communication is restored.

Rolls-Royce leads a project for ship automation

Satellite Number 4

Inmarsat continues to build its capacity for VSAT service technology.
A fourth GX satellite – Inmarsat-5 F4 – is currently completing construction and testing by Boeing in California.
This satellite is now likely to be launched in the second half of 2016 in order to provide additional GX network capacity.
During the course of 2016, Inmarsat will be introducing a series of market-specific, high-speed connectivity services powered by Global Xpress.

Links :

• GeoGraage blog : The Internet of everything sets sail / S@iLink, stay connected at sea ! / Drone ships move closer to reality as Inmarsat gets on board