Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "European training and research network on Autonomous Barges for Smart Inland Shipping" "Peter Slaets" "Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics (RAM), Waves: Core Research and Engineering (WaveCore)" "According to the European Commission, passenger transport is projected to increase 42% by 2050, and freight transport up to 60%. Needless to say, this puts an enormous burden on transport networks and our environment. Compared to other modes of transport – which often face congestion and capacity problems – inland waterway transport is characterised by reliability, energy efficiency and a capacity for increased use. More than 37,000 km of waterways connect hundreds of cities and industrial regions in Europe. In the EU, 13 countries share an interconnected waterway network, highlighting the potential for increasing the modal share of inland waterway transport. This will not happen unless we can make inland waterways economically competitive. However, with crew costs accounting for 60% of the total cost, autonomous inland vessels represent an exciting disruptive technology.AUTOBarge is about seizing an opportunity. Europe’s waterways are a vital resource that we have underused for most of the last century. Now, with the possibility for mass autonomous shipping, these canals and rivers offer a network that we can exploit without damaging the environment to the extent of new roads and aircraft runways. But to be able to do this we need new people with new skills. These innovators must be experts in remote control, monitoring, smart logistics, regulatory aspects, and many more areas associated with the complexity of inland shipping. The 15 early-stage researchers recruited to AUTObarge will begin this transport revolution." "European Training and research network on Autonomous Barges for Smart Inland Shipping (AUTOBarge)." "Wouter Verheyen" "Transport and Regional Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Chalmers University of Technology, Nord University, Delft University of Technology, University of Hamburg, Business and Law" "Europe's waterways are a vital resource that we have underused for most of the last century. Now, with the possibility for mass autonomous shipping, these canals and rivers offer a network of opportunities for sustainable logistics. A number of operational and technological research projects aiming at setting up such system are currently taking place. Apart from operational and technologic innovations being required for such market introduction, also important legal innovations stand in the way of a succesful commercial market introduction. These legal challenges exist both at the level of Regulation as at the level of contract law. The project aims to eliminate obstacles in both fields. A large number of provisions in existing regulation oppose against unmanned inland navigation. The problem underlying this, is that a legal framework acknowledging unmanned shipping, going beyond (ad hoc) experiment legislation is absent. This task will analyse regulatory obstacles standing in the way of unmanned shipping and will evaluate the policy arguments behind such obstacles. Based on this, the task will provide a toolbox allowing developers to conduct a compliance check of their designs. Further, it will analyse how such policy arguments were overcome in other industries, such as the airline industry. Based on this input this task aims to make a proposal for a regulatory innovation allowing for a market-introduction of unmanned inland shipping. Also a dedicated contract law framework, taking into account the changed actors, information availability and risks resulting from the evolution to autonomous inland shipping is absent. This absence leads to legal uncertainty, can endanger the insurability of risks and increase transaction costs. With this, the private law framework can constitute an important obstacle towards the commercial use of autonomous inland shipping. This is even more relevant taking into account the mandatory nature of transport law, thus limiting the room for contractual risk management. This task will first of all analyse bottlenecks in the contract law framework, standing in the way of legal certainty, predictability and a fair balance of interests for stakeholders involved in the operation of autonomous inland shipping. Based on this analysis and building on best practises from other fields of law and sector consultation, the task aims to make a proposal for contract drafting and an amended legal framework, ascertaining these interests." "Optimal Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Inland Shipping" "Eric Demeester" "Mechanical Engineering Technology, Group T Leuven Campus, Mechanical Engineering Technology, Diepenbeek Campus" "Autonomous vessels for inland waterways will provide a solution to multitude of socio-economic problems. While the inland shipping sector suffers from an outflow of shippers and a lack of investment in new vessels resulting in the use of old-fashioned barge designs, a sustainable solution needs to be found for the ever increasing logistical transport sector e.g. Europe expects a 50% growth of cargo in EU ports by 2030. This outflow of labour and inflow of transportable goods, calls for a disruptive innovation like autonomous inland vessels, called autonomous barges. Autonomous shipping is an emerging field demonstrating the opportunities of translating mobile robotics sensor and software technologies employed in marine applications. Currently numerous sensors exist in a maritime environment. However proper reliability or adequacy is lacking especially regarding inland shipping applications. This PhD research tries to find an optimal sensor setup for the application of autonomous inland shipping and fusing the sensory information for accurate and efficient localization. The study focuses on the design and experimental validation of a sensor platform, based on GNSS and IMU, and fusing the sensory information enabling the determination of precise location of the vessel specifically for the Autonomous inland waterway applications." "Towards Autonomous Inland Shipping." "Rene Boonen" "Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics (RAM), Applied Mechanics and Energy conversion (TME), Mecha(tro)nic System Dynamics (LMSD)" "Road transport dominates the European and Belgian hinterland freight transportsector. Over the last decades, approximately three quarters of the cargostreams passed by road, whilst inland waterway transport seems to offer a moresustainable alternative. Moreover, the larger inland vessels suffer from an excessof supply over demand, and the amount of smaller inland vessels is diminishing.This negative evolution in the inland waterway transport sector does not alignwell with the European and Belgian governmental ambitions to transfer morefreight transport to their waterways. This thesis aims to investigate a solution forthis emerging tension field by studying the technological feasibility of unmannedinland cargo vessels. More precisely, three research questions are answered.The first question explored: “How to design and construct an industriallyrelevant research vessel for unmanned inland cargo shipping?”. To investigatethe industrial relevance, the present inland waterway transport sector wasexamined. Three developments stood out. First, the European Watertruck+project introduced a novel fleet of modular push boats and barges. Hence, thewatertrucks can separate their navigation time from their cargo handling time.Second, Blue Line Logistics built new flat deck vessels with an onboard crane,which enables them to handle their cargo independently from the shoresideinfrastructure. These vessels focus on transporting palletized cargo. Finally,smaller urban freight vessels have already successfully transported cargo withinseveral European cities. Next to these industrial developments, the recentresearch evolution regarding unmanned shipping in general and the specificchallenges for inland waterway transport motivated the build of two unmannedresearch vessels: a scale model self-propelled watertruck barge and a functionalscale model of a flat deck barge which focusses on palletized cargo. In addition,both research vessels have a length that facilitates intracity freight transportresearch.The second question investigated: “How to model and identify the hydrodynamicmotion models of an inland cargo vessel?”. The modelling part focussed mainlyon the decoupled equations of motion in the water plane, i.e., the surge, sway,and yaw degrees of freedom. To identify this decoupled model, experimental data were fetched with the research vessel in its real outdoor environment. Twoidentification procedures were compared. The first one used the instantaneousforce balance, and the second one integrated the differential equations of thedecoupled motions. Furthermore, two independent data sources were usedto validate the identified models: bollard pull test data, measured inside atowing tank, and longitudinal damping data, calculated via computational fluiddynamics.The third question studied: “How to provide an unmanned inland cargo vesselwith perception and motion control?”. For this purpose, four navigationalenvironments were differentiated, based on the presence of known or unknownand static or dynamic objects. These environments influence the requirementsfor the perception and motion control systems of the vessels: exteroceptivesensors are needed to detect unknown objects, and traffic rules need to beimplemented in order to avoid dynamic objects. This thesis demonstrates thefirst successful missions of an unmanned and autonomous vessel navigating ona river with known static obstacles.Furthermore, this work provides an alternative answer for the last two researchquestions, by the construction of an inland shore control centre to remotelymonitor or control vessels. Accordingly, the operator performs the perceptionand motion control tasks for the vessel, and implicitly models and identifiesthe behaviour of the ship. A shore control centre, however, raises new researchquestions: can this centre help the operator to construct a feeling of ship sense,and can the operator keep the ship in harmony with the environment froma remote location? The initial experiments, with an operator in this controlcentre remotely controlling an unmanned vessel, delivered a first answer forthese novel questions. In addition, this thesis includes some preliminary resultswith an augmented remote control system in the control centre. This augmentedsystem offers the operator extra visualisations and measurements of the vesselon its navigational chart.Evidently, the technological feasibility of the abovementioned research questionsalone cannot judge the socio-economic feasibility of unmanned inland shippingin general. Consequently, this work aims to gain insights in order to enablehigher resolution socio-economic feasibility studies, with the ambition to guidethe course of future investments streams." "INLANAV - Innovative Inland Navigation." "Eddy Van de Voorde" "Transport and Regional Economics" "Three private partners (University of Antwerp, Schipco BV and Research Small Barges BV) are participating in the INLANAV-platform with a view of developing new vessel designs and facilitating market take-up. The concepts range from push barges powered by electric engines to the realization of an automatically guided barge with a greater hold; using new technologies and materials like for example composites.The University of Antwerp is examining a two stage tug and barge concept. In the first stage, the tug and barge concept sails on large waterways with several barges pushed by a single tug from seaports to the small inland waterways. In the second stage, at the entrance of a small inland waterway, the convoy is uncoupled and the small barges continue autonomously. The main focus of the concept is to combine economies of scale on large rivers (i.e. tugs and barges together) while the individual barges are small and economically feasible to sail on small waterways. This way the convoy can compete with its main competitor: road transport." SmartWaterway. "Edwin van Hassel" "Ghent University, Transport and Regional Economics" "By making waterway transport more cost-efficient, Smart Waterway will enable a modal shift for last mile urban logistics from the road to the small waterways in many European cities, including a city as Ghent. For small barges that could enter these waterways, however, the cost of automating a vessel is high compared to the construction cost. Hence, a cost reduction in automating small vessels will be crucial in this shift. We believe this can only be reached by drastically reducing the equipment cost on the autonomous vessel. This does, however, require significant advances in sensing and localization technology. Although a lower accuracy is sufficient for autonomous waypoint-based navigation, low-cost onboard sensors will not suffice in more complex scenarios (i.e. locks, bottlenecks such as bridges, loading and unloading bays) where accurate localization is needed to safely maneuver the vessel. To overcome this issue, these critical locations will be equipped with additional sensors (e.g., IR, cameras) and a novel ultra-wideband localization system. By combining low-cost onboard sensors with infrastructure near critical locations, Smart Waterway aims to achieve economically viable level 3 autonomy in urban waterways." SmartWaterway. "Peter Hellinckx" "Ghent University, Internet Data Lab (IDLab)" "By making waterway transport more cost-efficient, Smart Waterway will enable a modal shift for last mile urban logistics from the road to the small waterways in many European cities, including a city as Ghent. For small barges that could enter these waterways, however, the cost of automating a vessel is high compared to the construction cost. Hence, a cost reduction in automating small vessels will be crucial in this shift. We believe this can only be reached by drastically reducing the equipment cost on the autonomous vessel. This does, however, require significant advances in sensing and localization technology. Although a lower accuracy is sufficient for autonomous waypoint-based navigation, low-cost onboard sensors will not suffice in more complex scenarios (i.e. locks, bottlenecks such as bridges, loading and unloading bays) where accurate localization is needed to safely maneuver the vessel. To overcome this issue, these critical locations will be equipped with additional sensors (e.g., IR, cameras) and a novel ultra-wideband localization system. By combining low-cost onboard sensors with infrastructure near critical locations, Smart Waterway aims to achieve economically viable level 3 autonomy in urban waterways."