DACOMA is a Danish maritime start-up that designs, manufactures, and delivers innovative wave stabilizer solutions for crew transfer vessels and crew-/workboats. Our product targets the market segments of offshore wind installations, services and operations, aquaculture, offshore constructions, coast-guard and rescue services, small passenger vessels like water busses, super yachts, leisure and tourist boats. 

Our goal is to increase productivity of service and installation personnel due to eliminating motion sickness, to make crew transfer safer. Another unique property of our stabilizer is that vessel utilization is increased due to improved seakeeping and due to doubling the workboat load and crane capacity. In addition, our solution saves fuel, is more compact than competing systems and works in a wide speed range.

Dacoma’s vessel stabilizer is based on our own, patented Airkeel technology that we have developed in-house, including our control system, which is the key component. 

The DACOMA team has been working on bringing modern machine learning to small work boats to help with seasickness and hence increase the efficiency of wind farm technicians, who are not trained mariners. While working on this challenge we realized the potential in increasing stability of small work boats in static operation environments. In short, increased stability will improve the efficiency of the operations and the well-being of the crew.

We constantly optimize the mechanics and electrical components of the drive system and the hydrodynamics of the underwater appendages to the benefit of our customers. However, the biggest leap towards more comfort & safety and increased operational flexibility for different crane and load scenarios under all thinkable weather conditions, will come from collecting ship motion data and using them to “train” the adaptive control system (ACS) that we are going to develop in this project. The ACS will hence be the key component of our stabilizer system for many years from now. 

One of the major advantages of the ACS over our existing control system will be that the efforts of control system tuning during installation of our stabilizer into different boat types (refits or newbuilds) will be reduced to basically one day. This optimizes costs, shortens delivery times and increases adherence to delivery. Our stabilizer will not only out-perform existing stabilizer systems, but also will be easy and fast to be integrated.

Automasjon & Data AS (A+D) was established in 1991 as a software house and has since then developed into one of the world’s leading companies for MetOcean or meteorological and oceanographic data systems.

The main products range from simple Weather Stations to advanced complete Helideck Monitoring Systems and Environmental Monitoring Systems for marine and offshore users and other demanding applications. Such systems are measuring wind, temperatures, barometric pressure, motions, sea currents, waves, and more. They include a number of additional sensors and tailor-made functions that are essential for offshore users.

Typical add-on functions can be Anchor Line Monitoring, Stress Monitoring, Motion and Accelerations measurements, Alarm functions, SCADA applications etc.

All off-shore platforms and vessels need environmental data for daily operational use and as an important tool for safety purposes. In the later years these systems are also being tailor-made to measure the movements and conditions of the helideck and are used as a tool for improving the safety for helicopter traffic.

A+D have a lot of valuable experience from many different applications and a large number of special functions that have been integrated into our software in order to improve the user interface. Special emphasize has been put upon making the data displays easily understandable for non-technical users.

Our aim is to become the world leader in vessel motion monitoring systems (VMMS) and hence the technology and business developments we will gain during the AMCOSTAR project are crucial. We have always aimed at being a front-runner in technology development, and we see this project as a ground-breaking technology in vessel stabilization optimization.

We are also very invested in increasing the crew well-being, and this project will enable us to gather deep insights into comfort and safety indicators.

The Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (IME) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU Mechatronics) was established to strengthen the existing specialist fields within Mechanics, Mechatronics and Electronics. With a focus on sustainability and industrial collaboration, the department is training engineers at both BEng, BSc and MSc level in mechanical engineering, mechatronics, design engineering and electronics.

The SDU Mechatronics/IME team have tackled many different control and estimation techniques throughout their career, with nonlinear control, backstepping, neural networks-based control, optimal and adaptive control, model-predictive control, nonlinear observers, the modulating function method to name but a few. 

We apply these control algorithms experimentally on a wide number of different platforms and embedded computers that are widely used in the industry. In doing so, the important issue of rapid prototyping control systems comes into play. The team also have decades of expertise in this area (Matlab/Simulnk, S-Functions, real-time capabilities and deployment), including knowledge and expertise from maritime projects.

SDU Mechatronics will benefit through research opportunities, data acquisitions, applied learnings, student collaboration opportunities and not least publications from the Amcostar project. As part of Amcostar, we can continue and expand the research and development activities within wave stabilization and vessel motion monitoring to provide knowledge on sustainability in marine industry and increase its industry collaboration. Additionally, the project offers the possibility to extend our prototyping control systems experience and know-how to help marine industry to increase its efficiency which is central to contribute to sustainability in aquaculture. 

The very close cooperation with industry in this project is of great attraction to our department and we foresee long-term involvement with AMCOSTAR project partners.