Real time accurate tracking

Port Revel, the most famous ship pilot training centre in the world, is a ship handling school located near Grenoble (France). The vessels are built on a scale of 1/25, meaning that if a model is say, 10m in length, in reality it reproduces a vessel of 250m. The whole training facility is equipped with impressive systems to reproduce meteo-ocean conditions and cartography on this scale. Extreme accuracy in the navigation system, is therefore absolutely necessary, since every error margin is amplified by a factor of 25.

Satellite navigation system for training port pilots

When they heard about the features of G-NAV, Port Revel reached out to Cadden to equip their facility with state of the art technology for real time tracking, trajectography, GNSS RTK sensors, radio technology, cartography, RTK base station and PPU. The school is now equipped with a complete solution for real time accurate tracking and piloting. As of today, this setup is operating with no flaw or issue.

G-NAV antennas are mounted on each vessel to provide a navigation system based on an accurate GNSS (GPS-GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou) receiver. G-NAV offers enhanced precision at centimeter-level with dual L1/L2 frequency RTK augmentation. G-NAV can precisely detect speed, position, motion and ROT, delivering:

– 1 cm position accuracy

– 1 cm/sec speed detection

– <0,1°/min ROT

– 0.02° heading detection over 10m baseline (with Kalmar filter Gyro-Aiding)

All sensors mounted on each vessel, relay navigation data in real-time to the master trainer  room, using a wireless communication mechanism which is built inside the antennas. As you can see from the images, the antennas are powered by an ethernet cable (PoE). The other cable to G-NAV connects with another antenna clearly visible in one of the images above. Heading is computed via the dual-antenna system based on L1/L2 RTK GNSS and aided by gyroscopes using a Kalman filter. Heading accuracy of the GPS compass is 0.02° over 10 m baseline.