OceanSeven| Internet on the Ocean
Project Details
The Challenge | Internet on the Ocean
Internet service through the ocean
Internet service through the ocean is a project to give on budget internet connection throughout the ocean.
Internet service through the ocean
Apostolis Koteas
Paris Kotomatas
Aristomenis Theodoridis
Aristotelis Bakos
Vasileios Stavropoulos
Yiannis Plas
Giorgos Evdoxiadis
The Challenge
Internet on the ocean:
The internet is not easily accessible in many areas of the world, like the Earth’s oceans. Fishermen, sailors, and others have limited data connection with the rest of the world. Although satellite internet is widely available, it is very expensive for a user to implement. Our challenge is to design a low-cost method of delivering internet to people located far away on the ocean.
Our Solution
An existing effort to solve this problem used the AIS system of the ships to create a network between the ships with constant connection. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an automated, autonomous tracking system which is extensively used in the maritime world for the exchange of navigational information between AIS-equipped terminals and can also be used for internet connection (1). However, this method failed in the case of open oceans due to the long distances between the ships (>20NM). Our project aims in improving this technique by filling this gaps with specialized drones.
Each ship will carry two or three drones and will have the capability to charge them. When a ship is close to losing connection, a drone will launch and act as an intermediate node to continue the connection. In order to save energy, the drones will not hover continuously over a position but they will land and float on the water. At the moment another ship comes in range or the drone is about to lose connection it will return immediately at the ship. This way the ships will always be connected either directly via the AIS system or using the drones as intermediate nodes.
Drone concept
The drones that are to be used to reproduce the signal, shall be built around the following ideas.
- Be able to carry the antenna on a projected 5-10kg payload weight.
- Be able to float to save energy.
- Be able to hover and take off vertically.
To solve the above challenges, the drone of figure 1 is proposed.
Figure 1.Projected drone geometry(top-front(rotated)-left side).
All red parts can rotate.
This design is ought to respect the restrictions of the problem. More analytically:
Should the antenna’s geometry be cylindrical, the fuselage is able to host it through out. Should it’s of every other shape, proper hinges can be added.
The tilt-rotor engines, enable the horizontal take off, as well as solve the problem of hovering, while the gap on the back of their shells, is taken into account to host a collapsible “life jacket” on the back of each engine. The drone can navigate, shall it float with the tilt rotor rotated at 45o, as shown below. Moreover, a canard geometry has been chosen, with the canard wing demonstrating a negative dihedral to ensure that more sharp maneuvers can be executed, while a much bigger main wing with the stability of the aircraft.
Figure 2. On take of or hovering
Figure 3.Possition of the tiltrotor, on floating
Benefits
Using our method, the shipping companies have the following benefits:
- Low cost internet compared to satellite internet.
- Continuous connection.
- Easy and fast data exchange between ships. For example location, route, SOS signals.
- Easy data collection.
Using our system, the companies will be able to gather big amount of near real time information from their fleet. With this volume of data, the shipping industry will be able to make route and cargo optimizations using machine learning and also be able to use augmented reality for real time remote services.
Citations
2.https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-42.4/centery:30.4/zoom:4