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Ocean Digital Twin
Nature-positive through Ocean Digital Twin technologies

Key Features and Differentiation:

Key Features and Differentiation
By using ocean digital twin technologies, we realize a nature-positive future through an efficient cycle from planning marine environmental countermeasures to verifying their impact.

Key Business Benefits:

Key Business Benefits:
The ocean is emerging as a vital solution for addressing pressing societal challenges, including the pursuit of carbon neutrality. Its potential spans a wide range of applications such as blue carbon countermeasures, biodiversity conservation, and the environmental management of marine infrastructure and vessels.

Technical Overview:

Target Industry/Users:

  • Municipalities and Companies Engaged in Marine Environment and Facility Conservation
    • Municipalities:
      Organizations working on blue carbon credit distribution, port/coastal development and conservation, and regional revitalization (tourism, education, fisheries).
    • Companies:
      Energy companies (offshore wind power generation), companies that operate and manage ships, and consulting/research firms specializing in carbon offsetting and marine assessment.

Challenges in Target Industry and Operations:

- Measuring and assessing marine environments and facilities has required experts such as divers and marine scientists, making the process time-consuming.
- In harsh environments characterized by turbidity, waves, and currents, manual measurement and analysis encounter limitations in guaranteeing precision.
- Reliance on expert knowledge and empirical rules is inevitable, prolonging the time required for policy formulation.

Technical Challenges:

  • Cost of Marine Data Collection:
    • When attempting to reduce costs by replacing divers with underwater drones for automated measurements, stable and fully automated measurement is difficult due to currents and turbulence caused by coastal topography.
  • Accuracy Limitations in Marine Data Collection:
    • Due to the harsh conditions unique to the marine environment (such as turbidity, waves, and currents) and the enormous volume of ocean data to be processed, it is difficult to maintain measurement and analysis accuracy at a level applicable across diverse sea areas.
  • Dependence on Experts for Marine Data Analysis:
    • Analysis that considers environmental conditions for each sea area (such as seawater temperature and nutrient levels) and ecosystem interactions (such as symbiotic and predatory relationships) requires advanced expertise and knowledge. In particular, the analysis process involves numerous judgments based on tacit knowledge and experience, is time-consuming, and makes it difficult to perform accurate analysis without the know-how of specialists.

Solutions:

  • Autonomous Underwater Drone Navigation Technology:
    • Automatically controls underwater drones while considering ocean currents. By ensuring stable navigation along designated measurement paths on a map, with positional accuracy within plus or minus 50 cm of the intended route, it enables fast and automated collection of underwater data.
  • Seaweed and Seagrass Bed Quantification Technology:
    • Restores the colors and contours of objects in turbid seawater, enhancing the color and shape of seaweed and seagrass with high definition. Based on this high-definition data, it identifies seaweed and seagrass species and coverage with over 85% accuracy. Furthermore, it mathematically models blue carbon absorption according to algae species and coverage, enabling quantitative assessment of blue carbon.
  • Seaweed and Seagrass Bed Creation Simulation Technology:
    • By simulating and predicting the multifaceted impacts (such as seaweed and seagrass abundance and intervention costs) arising from symbiotic and feeding relationships between seaweed/seagrass and other organisms, environmental changes like sea temperature, and human interventions such as artificial structure placement, it enables prior verification of the overall effectiveness of implementing or varying these interventions.

Fujitsu's Technological Advantage:

  • Autonomous Underwater Drone Navigation Technology:
    • Automatic measurement (approximately 30 minutes per hectare) is possible even in coastal areas with complex topography, including locations near reefs.
  • Seaweed and Seagrass Bed Quantification Technology:
    • It supports representative seaweed and seagrass species that account for 80% of Japan’s seagrass bed area, making it applicable across a wide range of marine regions in Japan.
  • Seaweed and Seagrass Bed Creation Simulation Technology:
    • Seaweed and seagrass bed restoration and conservation activities, which have previously relied on expert knowledge and empirical rules, can be carried out more efficiently.

The benefits of Ocean Digital Twin (Detailed version):

Fujitsu's proprietary ocean digital twin technology enables a low-cost cycle of: (1) high-quality and rapid visualization of the marine environment, (2) multifaceted planning and execution of measures, and (3) effect verification. This contributes to solving various societal challenges related to the marine environment, advancing the realization of a nature-positive future.

Use Cases:

- For organizations such as municipalities and fisheries cooperatives that are considering the use and conservation of regional marine areas, this technology supports the visualization of the status of seaweed beds and other ecosystems, the monetization of blue carbon credits, environmental restoration, and the revitalization of the fisheries industry through planning and consensus-building of measures.
- In surveys of offshore wind power facilities and port marine infrastructure, data can be collected using semi- or fully autonomous underwater drones, enabling anyone to conduct inspections of underwater structures even in environments with currents and turbidity. By enhancing underwater images and using AI analysis technology to convert terrain and structure information into 3D data, it is possible to accurately visualize deterioration (such as corrosion and marine organism attachment), supporting the planning of measures.
- For ship hull fouling inspections, autonomous surface/underwater drones combined with LiDAR and high-definition cameras eliminate human risk and record/preserve the hull condition as highly reusable digital data in 3D space. This serves as evidence and simultaneously supports the reduction of cleaning costs, improvement of fuel efficiency, and reduction of GHG emissions.

Technical Trial:

Demo
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