Communication relay system and user interface for sharing real-time information inside ships

Abstract

As the maritime trade volume has increased, maritime operations have been steadily increasing. Especially, maritime operations are important to protect crews by promptly, and it is important to respond promptly to preventing leakage of materials loaded. For an initial response to an accident, smooth communication is essential. But, communication inside the ship is limited by internal bulkheads made of metal. Therefore, in order to support smooth communication during maritime operations, communication environment on the ship should be established. Based on this communication environment, a device is needed to share information between field headquarter and field agents. For the purpose, we developed a Communication Relay System to create a communication environment between inside and outside of the ship. And we developed a User Interface that can communicate with voice, text and share the field information. The experiments were conducted in various environments to evaluate the performance of the system and interface. Consequently, we can see that the Communication Relay System and the User Interface work well on ships.