Inside Angle: AI? A-Aye!

Self docking technology—a new thing? Bill Prince claims it’s been around for 35 years

Fully autonomous cars are here and ready for prime time. No, no. They’re not. But autonomous docking is coming your way, likely aboard a novice skipper’s boat, which is also headed your way as you sink another drink in your cockpit at the marina this summer.

Volvo Penta claims to have started the autonomous docking game a few years ago, but I think my dad had them beat by thirty-five years. I’ll get to that in a moment.

More recently Brunswick, Raymarine and others have followed Volvo Penta to the self-docking party. Brunswick has unveiled ACES (Autonomy, Connectivity, Electrification and Shared Access) and ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). Raymarine offers NAS and DAS (Navigation and Docking Assistant Systems, respectively) through their partnership with Avikus, a subsidiary of Hyundai Heavy Industries which is the world’s largest shipbuilder.

Ironically, nas, das and adas sound a lot like some of the noises I hear when a boat actually does collide with a finger pier or a nearby center console.

Back to Volvo Penta. Much like an mRNA concoction with which we’re all familiar, Volvo Penta says their self-driving prototype was developed in just a matter of months. “This was an expected next step from Volvo Penta,” said Johan Inden, their chief technology officer at the time.

How does it work? When the V-P boat arrives in a predefined “catch zone,” it alerts the captain that it’s ready to activate the self-docking function. Thirty-five years ago, this would be the moment, a hundred feet from the end of our home slip (aka the “catch zone”), where my futurist father would assess crosswind and current and suddenly alert 15-year-old me that he’s “ready to activate the self-docking function.”

Of course, those were not his exact words.

Rather, this alert came in the form of Capt. Dad walking away from the flybridge helm and exclaiming, “nature calls!” or “when you gotta go, you gotta go!” So I’d step in and smartly throttle-jockey my way into his slip. Genius, that guy!

Today, Raymarine has a system brewing called DockSense, an automated to-do using stereoscopic cameras to get the deed done without having to rely on a tanned teenager.

Somewhat like self-parking cars DockSense is enabled by trickle-down advancements in steering technology from avionics, and then automobiles. It wasn’t until electric power steering came along that cars could back themselves into a space with the help of a computer to spin the steering wheel without blue-haired intervention. With our boats, automated docking requires twins, triples, quads, quints or sexts (yeah, yeah) that can throttle and steer by wire independently to vector the hull into said catch zone.

Two, three or six outboards can now pivot and thrust independently to initiate a crab walk, a move you can’t execute on your own no matter how tan and fifteen you are. It’s akin to the computers in a Mercedes braking the inside front wheel in a hairpin, sending power to the outboard meats and tightening your line through the switchback. No lowly human driver has four brake pedals, so we can’t do that on our own. But the computers directing the Mercurys have four brake pedals, so to speak, so they most certainly can.

DockSense debuts on some relatively expensive boats first: Prestige yachts (we all know those guys need it the most) and certain outboard center consoles.

Was teenage me really the spark for this future tech? Well, my dad DID keep our boat not far from a major Honeywell facility, producer of autonomous missile guidance systems around that time. Honeywell had been partnering with Raymarine’s parent company Raytheon for decades by then, and hey, maybe my dad had connections. All I know is that he bought a really nice Audi when I was fifteen, so anything is possible.

If your boat, like mine and most others, is not equipped with the latest autonomous docking technology, maybe you have a teenager on board who’s pretty good but who could always use some practice.

I’ve got one of those teenagers these days. And I also have a backup: Me, the original prototype.

This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/inside-angle-ai-a-aye