The World in a Shoebox

Navy ships begin a new era of electronic navigation, service plans for full fleet digital conversion by 2009

By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor

The days of Navy ships navigating the seas with traditional two-dimensional paper charts may be coming to an end. With three-dimensional hydrographic electronic depictions for navigation already coming aboard some vessels, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) — successor to the former Defense Mapping Agency — is talking about navigation in four and even seven dimensions in the future.

Multidimensional charts, much like flight simulators and video games, give the operator the tangible and intangible advantages of spatial orientation, adding increased reality to navigation displays, and allowing more intuitive and interactive decision-making. For the navigator, multidimensional charts that can change in real time are particularly desirable for the most dangerous phases of marine navigation: entering and leaving port and sailing in coastal waters.

The prospect of multidimensional navigation comes on the heels of two revolutionary developments: the creation of electronic charts of the world’s oceans, and the certification of the first Navy ship and crew trained to use the Electronic Charting Display and Information — Navy (ECDIS-N).

Technicians and cartographers at the NGA have developed a three-dimensional software program called Harborview that gives the operator a realistic, interactive view of a harbor complex complete with navigation features and terrain all on a computer display screen. Because Harborview is linked with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver that provides the ship’s exact position, the view changes in real time as the ship progresses in or out of the harbor.

The operator can draw synthetic barricades on the system’s display to “wall off limits and obstacles,” according to Sharon Throne, an NGA technician, allowing a bridge team to keep the ship in the channel. Text can be added to identify landmarks.

Harborview is enhanced by imagery of ports posted in the software. These images are found on the Internet and in documents or are sent in by ships themselves, according to Gary Hosterman, an NGA technician. He said that although Harborview is not yet certified for bridge navigation, it currently is used onboard 40-50 Navy and Coast Guard ships for planning port entry preparation briefings and rehearsals.

“The goal is to get it certified,” said David Barnes, NGA’s program manager for Harborview. “The International Maritime Organization and the International Hydrographic Organization are just now coming together to draft specifications for 3-D and 4-D navigation. We think we’re ahead of most of the world. Once the specs are done, requirements will be stated and certification would follow.”

“4-D is when you put in a time variable,” said Chris Andreason, chief hydrographer for NGA’s Maritime Division. “We’re working to integrate a software package to include changing tides.”

The concept has been demonstrated at the University of New Hampshire, but is not yet set up for chart data, he said.

Andreason said that the next step would be to include water currents in the software, which would add three-axes of movement that would extend the realism to seven dimensions.

In May, the guided-missile cruiser USS Cape St. George became the first Navy ship and crew certified to sail with electronic navigation charts. The certification changed millennia of tradition, with digital navigation charts replacing those made of paper — and cloth and animal skin before them. Before the end of the decade, the Navy’s warships no longer will leave port stocked with heavy stacks of paper charts.

The crew of the Cape St. George, equipped with the Vessel Management System (VMS) built by Northrop Grumman’s Sperry Marine Systems unit, uses ECDIS-N interactive computers with real-time positioning systems and a library of electronic charts for navigation.

The ECDIS-N includes features such as a radar overlay capability, by which the radar display is matched with the digital chart. Displays can be stationed in multiple locations throughout the ship for improved situational awareness. Through an external track steering mode, the ship can actually be steered by the captain from his cabin.

Voyage planning that used to take several days is now a matter of hours. The system also stores 30 days of mission data for playback capability, acting like a “black box recorder” used on aircraft.

Two Los Angeles-class attack submarines — USS Oklahoma City and USS Hampton — also are equipped with the ECDIS-N capability. The Oklahoma City also has completed its evaluation of the electronic chart system. The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations has approved the submarine version, and the crew is expected to be certified by the commander of Submarine Forces by this fall.

Cmdr. Jeff Morse, the Navy’s program manager for ECDIS-N, estimated that the ECDIS-N costs approximately $195,000, plus $218,000 for installation. The Navy hopes to outfit 56 ships with ECDIS-N in fiscal 2006.

Navy and Northrop Grumman officials were unable to provide an estimate of total cost because the system, according to John Pyron, director of marketing for U.S. Defense at Sperry Marine, is embedded in numerous ship construction and retrofit contracts.

The success of ECDIS-N comes on the heels of a fatal reminder that navigation in the electronic age cannot be taken for granted. The Jan. 8 collision of the attack submarine USS San Francisco with an uncharted underwater formation south of Guam killed one crewman and injured 98 others. The Navy’s investigation pointed to errors in navigation that might have been more easily avoided with ECDIS-N, according to a Navy official familiar with the investigation.

The submarine’s paper chart for underwater transit showed no hazard to navigation, but the paper chart for surface navigation — not consulted by the crew — showed an area of discoloration, indicative of rising sediments brought to the surface by currents possibly sweeping up a sea mount. With ECDIS-N, digital charts overlaid on an electronic display could have alerted the crew to the existence of a possible hazard.

While marine navigation had seen dramatic advances, including electronic navigation aids such as the Global Positioning System, the Defense Science Board by the early 1990s was encouraging the Navy to adopt digital charts for navigation, according to Capt. Zdenka Willis, deputy oceanographer/navigator of the Navy.

Three initiatives “got everybody in the Navy thinking to go that way,” said Michael O’Loughlin, NGA’s liaison to the oceanographer/navigator of the Navy, paving the way for the ECDIS-N concept. In 1996, the submarine force began receiving a radar upgrade and wanted to go to digital charts. The next-generation submarine then being designed, the Virginia class, was going to be built without a chart locker. And the Smartship experiments, designed to reduce crew manning and automate many of their tasks, highlighted the advantages of automated navigation.

“We started looking around and looked to ECDIS,” Willis said, noting that ECDIS already was used by commercial shipping lines. The Navy formed a navigation steering group and determined features that would be required for ECDIS-N.

“We needed to have a comprehensive database that went from overland to the coastline to near shore to out to sea and underwater and air,” Willis said. The result was the Digital Nautical Chart and its classified companion designed primarily for submarines, Tactical Ocean Data.

The Navy also required the capability for marking lines of position and dead reckoning — not done much in the civil maritime sector — and needed increased availability.

The first library of digital charts “came out in 1996 to support Smartship,” O’Loughlin said, “and we finished the global database and made it operational in September 2004.”

“It was a lot of work,” Willis said. “We took over 5,000 charts, and every one of those charts had to be scanned in just to get them into a format you could work with, and then you had to digitize … some 30 million points, lines and polygons. This was manual work, no automated process.”

The charts of the world’s oceans now fit on just 29 compact discs that can fit in a shoebox, Willis said. Digital charts also are much easier to update, since they can be downloaded from the Internet.

Willis said that under current planning the Navy will fully convert to digital navigation by October 2009. She called it the “biggest innovation for bridge navigation since the advent of radar.”

As the end product of more than 15 years of effort, the electronic chart is also a beginning. The Navy already is looking at joining navigation with battlespace management functions — such as targeting naval fires.

“I think that as your ships go more to a [littoral] environment and you share data, you’re going to be able to tie your combat [direction center] and your bridge closer and closer together,” Willis said.

ECDIS-N is expected to further reduce bridge-manning requirements for Navy ships. The system already has reduced the bridge complement by two or three sailors on ships it has been installed on. “I expect that we will continue to decrease the manning on the bridge as we gain confidence [in the system],” Willis said.

The Navy also is looking to encompass more environmental data into navigation and warfighting. “We’re proposing the Littoral Battlespace Sensor System, bringing all this meteorological, oceanographic, hydrographic data … being able to fuse that and get that back into the fleet,” Willis said. “That is where the future is.”

In addition to charts, a variety of publications essential to safe navigation are being transformed into a digital format. The Nautical Almanac, celestial navigation computation, sailing instructions, navigation textbooks, port services indexes and en route planning guides all have been converted to digital databases.

Notices to Mariners — worldwide bulletins announcing new hazards to navigation, such as ordnance testing at sea, moving offshore drilling rigs, falling space debris, changes in navigation aids and other information that may affect safe navigation — now are posted weekly on the Internet, according to Jackie Barone, a marine analyst for NGA.

The same website — which became operational this year — also gives mariners instant access to the Antishipping Activity Database, which alerts readers to reports of piracy and terrorist activity. According to Howard Cohen, spokesman for NGA, which works with the Office of Naval Intelligence on the database, a user can type in coordinates or the name of a region to read reports of hostile activity. A mariner also can use a link to report piracy incidents.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s detachment in Norfolk, Va., also is developing software using NGA’s data to enable submarines to navigate using electronic charts that display gravity data. Software engineer Robert Greer said gravity affects inertial navigation systems, and that submarines are equipped with gravimeters to measure changes in the pull of gravity as the submarine moves over the ocean bottom. The software has been used on an experimental basis since the late 1990s and is being refined.

Mark Schultz, direct of corporate operations at NGA, said that even with all of the advances in navigation precision, much daunting work remains in charting the seas. “Forty percent of the world’s oceans are not charted today and 90 percent of them are not charted to GPS standards,” he said.