New visual requirements for naval bridge and ship-handling simulators
ABSTRACT Navigation and ship handling bridge simulators have been around since the 1970’s. The first visual systems delivered with these simulators provided fairly basic performances, especially when compared to aircraft simulators of the same era. However, they still managed to effectively deliver valuable training for basic navigation and collision avoidance training. But recent developments in visual systems and environment modeling have resulted in affordable visual systems that can support a much broader range of naval training applications. This paper will explore these new applications, what drives their requirements and the challenges to meet those requirements for the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN).

When the RCN took delivery of its first bridge simulators in the late 1990’s, the driving factors for the visual system requirements were the correct representation of land mass, lights, buoys and other visual aids to navigation as well as target ship aspect. The primary uses for these simulators were to teach safe radar and visual navigation as well as basic ship handling and manoeuvring. Quickly, the RCN realised that much more could be achieved with these training tools such as advanced ship handling, senior officer command qualification evaluation, and so on. The roles assigned to the RCN have evolved over the years since then and the requirements for the training to be accomplished in those simulators had to evolve to address these new operational scenarios.

Some of those new training requirements are:
· Ice Navigation: the RCN is having a greater presence in the Canadian Arctic. Bridge officers need to be trained in the simulators where the correct visual representation of different types of ice, open leads and adverse weather is important.
· Littoral Operations: the requirement for visual representation of shallow water and reefs is vital, as well as representing realistic scene to train for anti-piracy, swarm defence and remote-weapons direction.
· Boarding, fast boat and RHIB operations: proper visual simulation and synchronisation of waves, bow and stern wake as well as higher refresh rate are critical to recreate a realistic training environment.
· Tugging Operations: today’s warship bridge watch keepers are less familiar with working with tugs, so realistic visuals are needed to show slack and tension in lines and hawsers, wake and thrust direction as well as enhance depth perception.
· Operations Room / CIC trainers need to include visual systems to simulate video feed from CIWS and infrared surveillance system.

One of the challenges is keeping the procurement and maintenance costs down; this can be achieved by adding these new functionalities to the existing simulators as increments as opposed to designing and purchasing new custom designed simulators. Another challenge is the need to continuously keep the simulators upgraded with the latest technology in order to integrate the latest applications; luckily, modern image generators and display systems are much more affordable than ever before.

VITA Mr. Serge Côte is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) in Kingston with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering. Serge also obtained a Master of Science in Project Management from the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Following graduation from RMC, he served as a Combat System Engineer in the Royal Canadian Navy for 7 years, 4 of those years as an engineer on various naval simulator projects. Serge then moved on to Industry and worked for 13 years for Kongsberg Maritime Simulation in Norway and in Canada; he filled different roles in the company such as manager of delivery projects, development manager for navigation simulators and product manager of e-learning products. In 2009, Serge returned to Public Service as a project manager for naval simulator projects with the Materiel Group of the Department of National Defence.