The Harbour-AI collaboration, led by industry leaders RoboK with a grant from Innovate UK, uses Falmouth Harbour’s existing CCTV infrastructure for AI-powered, 24/7 monitoring capable of tracking and analysing vessel movements, identifying potential hazards to shipping or impacts to sensitive marine habitats and preventing accidents before they occur.

The Harbour-AI platform will provide support to Falmouth Harbour when it comes to training in vessel monitoring, detection of unusual movements and environmental risk assessment.

Falmouth Harbour CEO Miles Carden said: “The Innovate Funding award allows us to embrace the exciting new world of AI and if this unique pilot project with RoboK works for us it can work to improve the safety and efficiency of our operations. This can then be transferred to any harbour, port or marine business. Harbour-AI’s use of our existing CCTV infrastructure maximises the use of dataalready gathered in an affordable way. The up-skilling of our team is highly valuable are we are excited to be in the vanguard - exploring the uses of this mind-blowing technology.”

Good examples of Harbour-AI’s applications might be:

1. Monitoring the frequency of anchoring of vessels in sensitive habitats such as seagrass.

2. Automatically detecting unusual or suspicious activity and push-notifying the FH team.

3. Providing and assessing trends and providing data on vessel movements or speeds.

RoboK is a University of Cambridge AI spinout company with a mission to create safer and more efficient industrial workplaces. Co-founder and CEO Hao Zheng says, “Falmouth Harbour is a perfect partner to pilot our Harbour-AI platform - with a team keen to make the technological leap and a wide and varied range of commercial, leisure and environmental factors constantly at play.

“Our cutting-edge computer vision solution automates and analyses visual data from existing CCTV cameras, while our AI algorithms interpret this video data to provide safety incident detection and alerts.  This allows harbour staff to make more informed decisions while managing their operations more effectively – ultimately enhancing safety and compliance.”

Falmouth Harbour will receive £6,500 of grant for the AI pilot project with RoboK. Robok's whole project will cost around £85,000 with £65,000 from Innovate UK and will be running initially for 6 months. For more information on this and ongoing news on the Harbour's wide-ranging work and environmental initiatives visit https://www.falmouthharbour.co.uk/

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