22 May 2018
RANGER participated in Maritime Search and Rescue 2018 event in Helsinki, Finland in 22 May, and performed a presentation of the project advances for a distinguished audience of European and North-American professionals of maritime search and rescue. This year, the focus of the Conference was on increasing capabilities for operations in austere environments. Especially in the Arctic, increasing vessel traffic, developments in technology and extreme environmental conditions force many response units to review and increase their SAR capabilities.
The aim of the event was also to give the maritime SAR professionals an opportunity to discover innovative systems and capabilities to improve preparations for rescue operations, including but not limited to oil spills and mass rescue. In this later, the presentation of RANGER and the developing radar technologies (OTH and PE-MIMO) along with Early Warnings, Data fusion and Machine Learning, draw the attention of the participants. Other subjects of the presentation, prepared by Tuomas Tammilehto from Laurea University of Applied Sciences and Major Vasileios Papadopoulos from the Hellenic Ministry of Defence, were the changes in SAR operational environment when the capability to detect small vessels from a much wider area increases. For example, the way of performing searches would change when vessels in stress and in need of help could be detected from a much longer distance then today.
The audience was very interested in the outcomes of RANGER and most of the questions raised had to do with the cost-efficiency of the proposed technologies.
The presentation is available here: http://ranger-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/RANGER_SAR_Helsinki.pdf
