Year
2020
Operation Area
Pacific Ocean
Problem
It’s estimated that globally, one in five fish is caught through illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, costing around $36.4 billion each year. IUU fishing accelerates the depletion of fish stocks, harms marine ecosystems, and results in tens of billions of lost revenue for legal fishermen each year.
Congress has tasked the United States Coast Guard (USCG) with examining the feasibility, costs, and benefits of using autonomous platforms to improve maritime domain awareness in remote areas of the ocean.
Solution
Six Saildrone Explorers were stationed off the coast of Hawaii for a 30-day demonstration of their maritime domain awareness capabilities. Each week highlighted a real-world use case for persistent MDA: general traffic monitoring; illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing; search and patrol; and port security.
The vehicles were equipped with an optical array with onboard GPU, and machine learning software that fuses the data from all sensors, recognizes targets of interest, and alerts the end-user in near real time. Local boats were used as target vessels, sailing along and through the picket line of Saildrone USVs.
Outcome
The Saildrone Explorers successfully detected and tracked the target vessels performing behaviors associated with IUU fishing, such as longline fishing at the edge of a restricted zone and turning off their automatic identification system (AIS), or going dark, while entering protected areas.
