Future Drone Applications in Maritime and Offshore Industries
On 23 November 2020, the Periscope Network hosted the first drone day workshop in cooperation with Aarhus University and the maritime cluster of the Netherlands, (Nederland Maritiem Land, NML). The event was attended by over 60 participants, including major companies in maritime and offshore industries. Rui Pimentel de Figueiredo from Aarhus University, an expert in drones and robotics, opened the day with an informative presentation on drone developments with advanced vision, recognition and identification capabilities, automated responses to environment (pilotless drones), tool adaption and integration, and heavy payload lifting.
This was followed by a crowd-based forecasting exercise with the 'time to implementation' of 5 separate future use cases for drones at ports, in shipyards, at aquaculture farms, onboard ships, and at offshore wind farms. In the final part of the workshop, participants were divided into breakout rooms where they engaged with others to elaborate further on future use cases and to network for developing project applications. The workshop followed on from a previous workshop in the Netherlands: Drones meeting Maritime.
Aarhus University and NML are both partners in the Periscope Network, which aims at establishing a permanent innovation ecosystem in the North Sea Region to grow transnational innovation partnerships for sustainable business development in emerging blue markets.
The conclusion of the workshop is that there is a clear growth potential in using drones in the maritime domain.