Groke: A situational awareness system to make seafaring safer | Hacker News Reader

Groke: A situational awareness system to make seafaring safer

aqworks.com

71 pointsgkanai15 comments

Interesting seeing similar trends in industrial Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) for industrial control systems (ICS/SCADA). Is there a set of standards that maritime navigation systems follow for abnormal situation management (i.e., alarming/notifications)?

ICS is trending towards ISA101 - which is a very grayscale screen for operator control with specific colors for various alarms, events, and notifications for operators.

An interesting difference between operating ships and industrial control systems - both huge pieces of complex machinery with interconnected systems - is that humans have been operating ships without electricity, screens, and standards bodies for millennia.

> An interesting difference between operating ships and industrial control systems [...] is that humans have been operating ships without electricity, screens, and standards bodies for millennia

On the other hand, I believe historical crew compliments were much larger.

So the "systems" one was historically commanding and communicating with on ships were often skilled people, and thus much more intelligent and capable of expert action in their particular area.

Sorry for going completely off-topic but every time I see your name, I wonder is it like Ethernet bridge zero, or like Ethereum bro, or something else? Did the Pokémon Slowbro have anything to do with the name?

I replied to @WalterBright [0] about how his username was a nice pun on Breaking Bad, because I am ignorant, to which someone replied that it was his name.

So I truncated mine for a new username, because it looks silly and reminds me to be humble. And then swapped the o for an 0 when I wanted to karma-shed.

But yes, also some of those things you mentioned. It's multi-referential.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright

Indeed. Pre-industrial seafaring was a very different enterprise. Most of the time operating ships without screens and electricity, they were also operating without motors and, for a long while, without radar or electronic navigation.

On the subject of ships without electricity, it's probably worth pointing out how dangerous Age of Sail ships would have been compared to modern ships. Right up until the last commercial sailing ships square rigged sails were raised and lowered by sending men out on the yards without safety harnesses or anything, just a footrope to stand on and another line to hold on to. As well as skill you'd need nerves of steel and a strong constitution!

Slight aside: anyone who grew up reading Tove Jansson‘s Moomin books will remember the Groke—the closest thing that the Moomin world had to a monster. She spent all of her time wandering the world looking for warmth and (mostly inadvertently) terrifying people.

It’s interesting to me that they named their company after her.

You make me want to reread my childhood. I came across some Moomin coffee cups at a random thrift store, and bought them for my mother.

For those who didn't have an odd American childhood like me (or a normal Finnish one?), context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomins

There is one particular episode of the cartoon where the Groke is waiting in the field outside the Moonin house, then when they open the door she is gone... because she is now stood on the porch right beside the door.

Still sends a shiver down my spine at 35.

> In our research, we found that they’re usually turned off because the frequent beeping causes annoyance or confusion. We sought to design a series of sounds that are audible on the loud bridge, striking a balance between being pleasing and calling for attention at just the right times.

High pitch/fast tempo audio feedback is a pretty common design approach for warnings in medical devices.

If the AQ guys read this thread, I would be pretty curious on a more detailed write-up specifically on your research findings regarding audio feedback?

(And how it lead to these more pleasant lower pitch tones)

I'm curious what the defaults are in terms of ship instrumentation, I have an (aviation) pilot's license so am familiar with aviation's default UIs, but not a boat.

Aviation's are in many cases what we would call "crap" and have seen improvements by leaps and bounds since GPS-enabled multi-function displays have become available.

What's the difference in a boat and an airplane, in UI terms?

Stuff like this makes me wonder if video game HUDs might be a glimpse towards what the future of those kind of navigation panels might look like

There have been lots of aviation HUD projects fail to gain any traction over the years. The reason is that a HUD is a very specialized military design, aimed at allowing the pilot to maintain a visual connection with something in the outside world while reading instrument data.

In civilian use, there's little practical reason to look outside the aircraft rather than look at an instrument on the panel. You can fly all the way from wheels up to wheels down without caring about what's visible through the windows. In fact, in some cases the outside world can be a nuisance / distraction. LED strobe and nav lights for example are a great improvement in reliability, but they're also brighter than the old incandescent lights at a short distance. The effect of that is when flying inside a cloud at night, the flashing LED strobe is like a constant lightning bolt going off in front of your face. The solution is to put your IFR training goggles (blindfold) on, so that you can't see outside. By extension, you wouldn't see a HUD either.

The most useful UI improvement in airplane panels in the past 20 years has been color-coded multi-function displays. [1]

Grey or Green: don't care.

Yellow: you're close.

Red: you're going to hit it, something is wrong.

You don't need to do any math, don't need to memorize anything on the approach procedure, you only need to glance at the moving map... if there are yellow things on it it's time to look up and see if you can find the runway, if not you need to think about missed approach. If you see red things on it, you have to have the runway visual, or call missed approach right now. Color codes on engine data panels are similarly useful. I don't need to know all of the numbers. I just need to know that it's making power, drinking a reasonable amount of fuel, and not on fire. If everything on the engine computer's panel is white or green that's enough, I don't care about the details. If it has a yellow I need to check and see what it is, if it has a red I need to give it my full attention right now.

Hitting some tall obstacle you forgot about immediately after takeoff or while descending to land is the most common aviation hazard most people will face. A close second is engine failure in flight that probably had warning signs the pilot failed to notice before the failure. The terrain display has saved me (maybe) once. I took off into the path of a mountain at night and had inadvertently kicked the emergency landing gear release with my foot prior to the takeoff roll. It's a hydraulic system in which the gear is normally extended when the pressure is lost. The pump pressure holds the gear up (most light aircraft designs are this way). It wasn't obvious right away due to the placement of things on the panel why we were not going very fast. There was a red light but no aural alarm on a gear fail condition in which the gear was fully extended, all of the alarm conditions were about improper gear extension that were not safe to land on. The panel has lots of different color lights and at night they're harder to discern. Guy in the right seat (an instructor friend of mine) started to grab his yoke and get ready to tell me he wanted control of the airplane when I pointed out something was wrong, but I could point to the color-coded map display showing all of the obstacles and tell him "stop it, the mountain is yellow, we're not turning 180 degrees here close to the ground. We're gonna clear it, we'll figure it out on the other side."

The post-mortem of all that was one's gut reaction in a crisis is to make the problem harder than it really is. We got into all sorts of fuel calculations, wind calculations, and where would we divert to with a 24 hour control tower rather than the destination we filed for (so that they could shine a spotlight on the gear and confirm it was down). After 5 minutes or so of hypothetical bullshit one of us had the bright idea to stop theorizing and troubleshoot the problem.

Took more like 30 seconds (rather than 5 minutes) to fix it and get the gear up once the problem was narrowed to solvable tasks.

1. https://ipadpilotnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/WingX-G...

It's really not standard. I've crewed for a 100 ft curently operating commercial vessel (i.e. USCG approved) with nothing digital -- just a wheel, a throttle, and some lines for controlling sail.

The display style of Electronic Charts are standardised, but not the UI of the device that display them. However, seafarers are required to be formally trained on each type of Electronic Chart display they use.

Beyond that, not much. The instrumentation of a harbour tug with a simple shaft drive will clear be very different to an ocean-going cruise ship with sophisticated steerable propulsion pods.

Arguably, apart from engine instruments there is only one "default" instrument which virtually every powered boat has - a compass.

Traditionally, large ships had a substantial array of individual control panels supplied by different manufacturers which took up a large amount of physical space, and the senior officers would give orders to the people operating them rather than walking backwards and forwards constantly.

On the latest passenger ships, similar to aircraft they are moving more towards integrated multi-function displays which enable all systems to be directly controlled by one person.

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