Four of Finnish Geospatial Research Institute researchers made a test trip on m/s Viking Amorella on route Turku-Stockholm-Turku. Mild winter weather in the beginning of February granted perfect conditions for some testing related to ESABALT -project.

Liang Chen, Sarang Thombre, Stefan Söderholm, and Robert Guinness conducted the tests.

The aim of this test campaign was to collect data generated by the ship’s own electronic systems, and also to determine the availability and performance of navigation and communication signals along the maritime route. Over the course of three days, data from the ship’s Differential GPS and AIS systems, engine room sensors, navigation satellites, the Finnish Reference GNSS network (FinnRef), local FM, Digital TV (DTV), 3G and LTE stations was collected.

In-person interviews were also conducted with the on-bridge crew responsible for navigating the vessel through the challenging Turku and Stockholm archipelagos. The results, observations, analysis and conclusions from this campaign will be summarized in a conference publication accepted to the Institute of Navigation’s GNSS+ conference in Autumn 2015 in USA. The results are expected to enable distillation of the most critical information for crowdsourcing in the maritime scenario and to enable devising strategies for automated data crowdsourcing from the vessels to make this process autonomous of crew/manual intervention.