E-Navigation: a distributed decision support system with extended reality for bridge and ashore seafarers

A distributed decision support system has been developed to assist seafarers during several navigation tasks, for instance, in avoiding a collision with a detected obstacle in the sea and envisioning a future autonomous navigation system. In this paper, the decision support system is based on the results of a customized simulation model representing the ship's behavior, including hydrodynamics, propulsion, and control effects. Sensors monitor and collect the parameters of the environment and the ship onboard. The telemetry and the calculated route are visualized on a wearable visor exploiting augmented reality. Such context information is also replicated ashore through a narrow-band satellite link using an IoT publish-subscribe communication paradigm to allow one or more remote seafarers to supervise the situation in a virtual reality environment. Overall, the potential of the proposed system is presented and discussed for application in the context of autonomous navigation.