ALEXANDRIA, Va. - To improve marine navigation safety, enhance system efficiency and reduce buoys-tendering operational cost for the government, computer scientist Tung “Alex” Ly with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) invented the “Digital Buoy Systems and Method” at ERDC’s Geospatial Research Laboratory (GRL).
An ERDC researcher for 27 years with a background in electrical engineering, Ly used his expertise in both hardware and software design to receive a U.S. patent for his safety-enhancing and money-saving electronic buoys in May 2022. He also won the prestigious ERDC Research and Development Award as the Center’s top project in 2021.
Also noted on the patent for this digital buoys system for civil-work marine navigation are cartographers Denise LaDue and Duane Morrison with the Army Geospatial Center, both experts in Geographic Information System (GIS).
According to Ly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is responsible for planning and constructing improvements to inland water navigation, along with dredging and maintaining 12,000 miles of inland waterways.
“Water navigation safety markers (buoys) are designated national critical data,” Ly said. “This system of maritime aids to navigation provides the ‘lane markers, street signs, stop lights’ for the ‘nautical rules of the water,’ much like the driving rules of the road.”
“Not including coastal water, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) maintains more than 12,000 buoys for inland water by constantly operating a fleet of buoys-tendering vessels to ensure marine navigation safety for the public, private and commercial transportation on the nation’s waterways,” Ly added. “The USACE Inland Electronic Navigational Charts Program (IENC) is providing the charts/maps of the inland waterways and its buoys.”
Relying on these water markers for marine navigation, more than 600 million tons of goods were transported in 2018, along with $232 billion worth of commerce on inland waterways. The majority of U.S. grains and agricultural output for export move through the inland river systems to reach the coastal ports, as U.S. agricultural commerce reports show.
Need for his invention
Ly explained that the buoys drift from the original positions and must be manually relocated to the correct locations. He recognized that there was no system for real-time remote, land-based monitoring and tracking of the buoys once placed in the water.
“Back in mid 2010s, I was working on a software project to develop a database and communication system and application to help the USCG Buoys-Tender ships and the users to maintain, update, share and publish the buoy data,” Ly said. “While on the USCG ships and observing the manual operations, I got permission to put together a system to remotely track, perform data acquisition, update and publish the new buoy positions via a ‘home-build’ hardware for ship-shore-ship communication system and application.”
“But due to technology and market limitation of hardware communication, energy sources and cloud computing at the time, I couldn’t figure out how to implement this idea in a much larger scale economically and reliably,” Ly said. “However, in the years after that with the advances in technology and technical experiences gained while designing and developing several military and combat-support sensing and communication systems, I was able to ‘revisit and re-conceptualize’ a digital buoys system for civil-work marine navigation.”
Ly’s technical proposal was submitted in 2017. The concepts design, the prototyped system development and field experimentations followed from the summer 2018 to the spring 2020.
“The ideas were proposed and funded through a GRL-IENC special research and development project collaborating with the U.S. Coast Guard. Technical feasibilities were developed through a series of land-based experiments to emulate a water environment at the NOAA facilities at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia,” Ly said. “Initial water-based prototypes and small experimentations were done on the Occoquan River in Virginia. The final prototypes and larger experimentations were created and tested in a 10-mile stretch of the Ohio River around the USACE Louisville District.”
Praised as a “Game Changer”
U.S. Coast Guard officials with the Louisville District, where the electronic buoys were tested, commented that the invention was a “game changer,” citing the low cost, low power and low maintenance advantages.
The digital buoys system “would help to reduce operational cost to the U.S. Government and provide real-time, reliable and enhanced marine navigation safety to U.S. private and public industries,” Ly said, adding that the estimates for potential savings based on nationwide buoy deployment could total more than $300 million per year in buoy-tendering operation costs when combining the USCG and USACE fleets, using figures from the 2015 USCG operational costs.
“Other hardware and software applications could be derived from this patented system through further research and experimentations. They also could be applied to land-based navigation,” Ly said, citing advantages of this invention. “The system of electronic buoys and its applications would benefit many programs from other federal, state and local government agencies, as well as commercial vessels of marine navigation and transportation industries, waterway-related business, public and private vessels.”
Ly said that the systems, methods and concepts are now a government technology, available for commercial licensing to develop and implement in a production environment in a larger scale.
The invention team will be honored in 2023 with a patent presentation ceremony by leaders of ERDC’s Office of Research and Technology Transfer, which processes patents for the Center. A copy of his patent plaque will be placed on the Inventors’ Wall at ERDC headquarters in Vicksburg, Miss.
For more technical information, visit: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11350382