Partnership will integrate SEA.AI’s AI-powered machine vision into Anschütz’s Autonomics Navigation Suite to enhance situational awareness and collision avoidance
SEA.AI and Anschütz have formed a partnership aimed at strengthening autonomous and highly automated navigation by combining SEA.AI’s AI-powered machine vision technology with Anschütz’s navigation systems expertise. The companies will integrate SEA.AI’s technology into the Autonomics Navigation Suite, with design and validation work beginning immediately.
The Autonomics Navigation Suite is designed to provide components for autonomous navigation and navigation assistance systems in line with the new MASS code.
A key component is situational awareness, considering targets, depths and charted objects, within which COLREG-based collision and grounding avoidance trajectories can be safely planned and executed.
SEA.AI’s contribution is more than a camera feed. Its AI identifies and classifies what the optical and thermal sensors see: a vessel, a buoy, floating debris, or a person in the water, for example.
Radar, ENC and AIS remain the backbone of collision avoidance, and neither sees everything. Radar can miss small, low, or debris-sized targets, particularly amid clutter or at close range. Buoys can be adrift with regards to their charted positions and AIS only reports vessels equipped with an active transponder.
SEA.AI’s optical detection technology classifies what a human lookout would see, day or night. The partners plan to add this capability to Autonomics as another sensor track enhancing the situational picture.
Consider a ferry crossing a crowded strait at night while an unlit fishing boat sits close to its track. Small vessels are often difficult for radar to hold reliably and may not be fitted with AIS. By also integrating SEA.AI’s classified targets,
Autonomics can take the fishing boat automatically into account, detect the risk early and propose a COLREG-compliant course change for confirmation by the officer on watch.
For more than a century, Anschütz has been a leader in the field of navigation, integrating electronic charts, radar, navigation sensors and other systems to provide a consistent situational picture on the bridge. With its trusted sensor technology, its autopilot systems and the Autonomics Navigation Suite, Anschütz is pioneering autonomous and highly automated navigation.
Since 2018, SEA.AI adds another sensor layer, closing the situational-awareness gap with machine vision developed for maritime safety. Together, they pair Anschütz’s proven authority on the bridge with SEA.AI’s detection of what that today’s sensor systems might not otherwise see.
“Seeing pixels is easy. Turning them into a classified object that Autonomics can act on- a vessel, a buoy, a person in the water, before it becomes a risk- is what SEA.AI’s AI does. Combine that with Anschütz’s century of experience getting information safely onto the bridge, and collision avoidance can finally act on what it used to miss.” – Marcus Warrelmann, CEO, SEA.AI
“With Autonomics, we want to make seafaring safer by providing insightful recommendations and collision avoidance execution assistance based on a clear situation picture to assist and relieve the officers onboard. Reliable detection of and information about small objects, as provided by daylight and infrared cameras as well as SEA.AI’s machine vision technology is the missing link in existing commercial maritime sensor systems that we are about to close. This represents a further step towards a decision-support system that commercial crews can rely on in any situation on a real bridge.” – Hans-Christoph Burmeister, Business Development Commercial Markets, Anschütz GmbH
SEA.AI and Anschütz will both exhibit at SMM 2026 in Hamburg, running 1 to 4 September. SEA.AI will be at Stand B8.229 and Anschütz at Stand B6.304
