The Concept of Automated Draught Survey System for Marine Ships

The main income of a merchant vessel comes from the transportation of cargo. Nevertheless, when carrying out cargo operations, many actions like ballast measurements, ship draught reading, and a significant part of calculations are performed by a human, which leads to inevitable errors and financial losses. In this work, we propose the concept of automated system for cargo operations control and monitoring. It includes a set of various sensors, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a computing center. The main feature of this system is the use of a digital camera, mounted on UAV, for ship draught reading. Video recording, perceived from that camera, is meant to be processed by combination of convolutional neural networks. The paper also presents the results of simulation of this system at the current moment.