14 Feb 2023by Martyn Wingrove
Navigation simulators will be installed in the UK as part of the British Royal Navy’s seafarer training modernisation
Kongsberg Digital will provide a new suite of simulators as part of the Royal Navy’s Project Selborne to improve competence in vessel manoeuvring and navigation.
Existing trainers, which have served the Royal Navy for the last 20 years, will be replaced with new simulators enabling bridge teams at Britannia Royal Naval College, HMS Collingwood and HMNB Faslane to operate together.
Teams will be able to train together with multiple vessels in the same scenarios, reducing associated risks, logistics and the cost of seagoing training programmes. Additional simulators will be installed at HMS Collingwood, raising its capacity and training resilience.
Capita is running Project Selborne, a 12-year programme to modernise and deliver training for the Royal Navy. It contracted Kongsberg Digital to deliver the new bridge simulators and software for practicing single unit pilotage and other multi-ship scenarios, such as replenishment at sea and task-group manoeuvres, day and night and in all weather conditions.
“The new bridge trainers will modernise the navigation training synonymous with the Royal Navy,” said Royal Navy training management group commandant colonel Aaron Fisher.
“Future upgrades will provide the ability to train across multiple establishments via a secure network, and provide a tangible example of Royal Navy and Team-Fisher collaboration to deliver training modernisation for our people.”
Using customised bridge configurations and instruments, bridge teams will experience realism in a range of training scenarios. Advanced engineering and hydrodynamic vessel modelling in the simulators ensure vessels, objects and equipment behave realistically.
“This new suite of simulators will not only create highly realistic training scenarios for Royal Navy trainees, but will also deliver significant resilience to the Navy’s training programme by allowing us to run, test and roll out regular updates without the need to wait for holiday downtime,” said Capita managing director for defence training David Hook.
“This is a significant milestone in Project Selborne’s mission to get better trained people to the front line, faster.”
Part of the deliverables are virtual reality (VR) headsets to be used for ship handling and vessel replenishment scenarios. Metaverse VR is providing immersive training solutions based in Portsmouth and will provide modelling support to the project, including VR training systems.
“A number of naval academies worldwide are using our simulator systems today for education and training purposes,” said Kongsberg Digital executive vice president of digital ocean Andreas Jagtøyen.
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