WEBINAR: Autonomous Vessels Recent Trends and Challenges - A Class Perspective
IMarEST TV recording from the Naval Engineering Special Interest Group on the 30th June 2022. This webinar was presented by Vice Admiral B S Randhawa of the Indian Navy and Mr R Srinivas of the Indian Register of Shipping.
The maritime industry is seeing a rise in projects to demonstrate remote-controlled and autonomous vessels. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) while acknowledging the development of new technologies, issued guidelines on categorisation and testing/trials of such vessels and parallelly initiated an exercise to identify regulations which could become hindrances to such developments. It is worth noting that other transport sectors, which have started the work a considerable time back, are still to make a successful full-scale commercial launch of such vehicles.
This webinar discusses various autonomy levels, vessel safety and challenges in certification (from a Classification Society’s viewpoint) when such new technologies are used in autonomous vessels.
About the Speakers
Vice Admiral BS Randhawa, PVSM, AVSM, VSM; is the former Chief of Materiel of the Indian Navy, the highest appointment for technical officers of the Navy. In this assignment, he was responsible for managing naval technology, maintenance of afloat and shore assets of the Indian Navy, creation and modernisation of naval industrial infrastructure, research and development programmes and related organisational issues. Prior to his last assignment, he was the Controller of Warship Production and Acquisition responsible for implementing the Navy’s shipbuilding and ship acquisition programmes. He has also served in the strategic submarine programme of the Navy and has been the Admiral Superintendent of the Naval Dockyard at Visahkapatnam.
He is an alumnus of the National Defence Academy, a postgraduate Marine Engineer from the Royal Naval Engineering College, UK and an MBA from the University of Delhi. His naval career spanned 40 years. He is currently the Principal Defence Advisor to the Indian Register of Shipping, the ‘national’ ship classification society. He has contributed to the considerable increase in the range of services provided by the Indian Register for the shipbuilding and ship maintenance programmes of the Indian Navy and the Indian Coast Guard.
Mr R. Srinivas is Vice President & Senior Principal Surveyor at the Indian Register of Shipping (IRS). Mr Srinivas specialises in control and automation systems, system integration, maritime cyber risk management and failure mode effect analysis. He has nearly 39 years of maritime experience. He has 13 years of experience in shipbuilding where he was in charge of installation, commissioning and testing of electrical, control, automation, navigational and communications systems on board.
He has 12 years of experience in ship designs and was involved in the preparation of class drawings, and production drawings and also headed various consultancy projects for shipyards and ports in automation, networking & VTMS. He has been with the IRS for nearly 14 years and presently is heading the Electrical and Control Systems department in the IRS plan approval division. He is an IRS member of IACS Cyber Systems Panel and in Joint Industry Working Group on Cybersystems.
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