Ready for ARPA Action
Dear guest, welcome to the ARPA project! The acronym stands for Applied Research Platform for Autonomous Systems. Due to their importance for South-West Finland, we at Turku University of Applied Sciences and Novia University of Applied Sciences focus on marine industry and shipping.
The two-million-euro project funding provided by the Ministry of Education and Culture for so-called RDI profiling means that both of our universities of applied sciences are focusing on autonomous systems at the strategic level in the future.
Remote operations and partly automated vessels will be important steps in the progress towards fully autonomous logistics. The road will be a long one and depend heavily on surrounding regulation processes as well.
With that in mind, we have selected four main components for ARPA:
- Within the maritime domain, we aim to provide high-quality open data that researchers and industry can utilize to develop methods for situational awareness for autonomous vessels and to develop decision-making algorithms.
- The factory environment targets Industry 4.0 applications such as robotics and autonomous indoor logistics.
- Digital twins and simulations create meaningful digital prototyping and testing environments. The first step of the twinning will be a real-time simulation model of a 3D fairway.
- The data platform is the central hub for all the data collected in physical test environments and produced within digital twins and simulations. The platform will be utilized in distributing open data sets.
The interdisciplinary collaboration in creating a novel and unique testing environment builds assets for the industry and science. The ARPA project aims to work in a close relationship with the businesses developing products and services for intelligent shipping.
All initiatives relating to data utilization in the field of autonomous systems are of special interest to us. Let’s talk and make things together!
Jarkko Paavola & Jenny Lauronen,
Project Managers of the ARPA project