Atostek’s Flexbot accelerates maritime surveillance autonomy in the USVA project
The USVA project is developing a completely new platform for maritime surveillance. Atostek’s software platform, Flexbot, enables autonomous operations of the vessel, sensor data fusion, and system interoperability in demanding conditions.
Critical infrastructure located in Finland’s maritime areas, such as ports, underwater energy pipelines, communication cables, and offshore wind farms, is largely privately owned. Ensuring the safe and uninterrupted operation of these assets requires increasingly efficient and adaptable surveillance solutions.
Uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) offer a new way to monitor the environment, transmit observations in real time to monitoring centers, and operate reliably in challenging conditions. Surveillance capabilities can be further expanded by utilizing drones operating in various environments—both in the air and underwater.
The USVA project (Uncrewed Surface Vessels for Automated Critical Infrastructure Protection) is developing new maritime surveillance solutions for private operators by leveraging autonomous surface vessels. The goal is to enhance the ability of authorities and infrastructure owners to form a shared situational awareness and respond to anomalies quickly and appropriately.
Atostek serves as one of the project’s contributors, with responsibility for developing the software suite for the USVA vessel. This software is being built using Atostek’s Flexbot software platform, which enables the integration of various software components into a unified and interoperable system. In practice, this involves combining, adapting, customizing, and testing functionalities that support the vessel’s autonomous navigation, control systems, and data processing of observations. This ensures that the surface vessel operates reliably and effectively even in changing and demanding conditions.
The rocky archipelago along the Finnish coast of the Baltic Sea, varying weather conditions, as well as GPS and communication interference, impose exceptional operational reliability requirements for surveillance systems. The USVA project addresses these challenges by developing solutions capable of operating dependably in such an environment.
The USVA project is funded by Business Finland as part of the Patria eALLIANCE flagship program. The initiative is coordinated by Turku University of Applied Sciences and includes partners such as Patria, Marine Alutech, Atostek, Brighthouse Intelligence, Nordic Inertial, and Luode Consulting, as well as the University of Turku and Laurea University of Applied Sciences.