KVHWatch. Photo: KVH Industries
KVH Industries and Kongsberg Digital have installed their first joint maritime IoT system on an active working vessel, the companies announced Thursday. The team installed a KVH Watch VSAT antenna for IoT connectivity and the Kognifai Vessel Insight platform on Simrad Echo, a Norwegian research vessel owned and operated by Kongsberg. KVH Watch and Kognifai Vessel Insight aim to provide provide an integrated infrastructure for IoT connectivity and vessel-to-shore data, and say that this is one of the first cases of an active working vessel using an integrated maritime IoT solution.
Simrad Echo will use Kognifai Vessel Insight to monitor main and auxiliary systems on the vessel and help ensure 100% availability. The data flow from Simrad Echo will be facilitated by KVH Watch IoT Connectivity as a Service, a VSAT solution that uses KVH's end-to-end maritime connectivity services and high-throughput satellite (HTS) network. The two companies plan to utilize Simrad Echo as a platform to develop tighter integrations for remote support and smart bandwidth utilization that may benefit both new and existing customers. Simrad Echo will continue normal operations during the pilot maritime IoT project.
"While Vessel Insight works as an infrastructure for accessing contextualized quality data from a vessel or fleet, KVH is providing an alternative for IoT connectivity that enables the transfer of data from ship to cloud," said Vigleik Takle, Kongsberg Digital's senior vice president of maritime digital solutions.