Giving the Boat a Brain

NATO DIANA Contract with Hefring Marine will put AI eyes on the water

Smash...smash...smash...Fast boat rides are fun. Anyone who has been out on a motorboat in rough weather knows the feeling of hard landings from wave to wave, but those landings can have a cost. The boat can be damaged, but we are learning so too can your body. Hefring Marine, an Icelandic technology company founded in 2019, began with a research project examining the effects of those impacts.

Tom Goldthorpe, Marketing Lead for Hefring Marine, says Hefring's work followed serious incidents involving tourists aboard fast boats in Iceland. “People were breaking their spines," he says, "people were having their teeth shattered.” Even exposure to the hum of an outboard motor can damage the brain and skeleton over the long term.

The research evolved into Hefring’s Intelligent Marine Assistance System, or IMAS. Tech was developed to measure forces and angles on the water, and was developed with AI until it could anticipate what might happen. It's a small apparatus installed with simple screws and cables, and makes real use of the onboard devices like GPS and AIS that most boats already have. Using vessel motion, environmental data and onboard equipment, IMAS can predict conditions up to 120 seconds ahead and tell skippers when to slow down or adjust heading to avoid damage.

Assessment dimensions became highly specific too. Goldthorpe says IMAS can even tell the direction of force on impact, and can deduce which area of the boat may be damaged. It provides users with just about any information they might need, and can show the location of nearby watercraft too. It can reliably save a boat operator 20% on fuel if they make use of the tech's reporting on average fuel consumption, IMAS is currently deployed on more than 350 vessels across 18 countries, and soon it may be many more, in an even more advanced form.

The same artificial intelligence and sensor technology of IMAS powers Hefring’s Observation and Domain Intelligence Network, or ODIN, for maritime domain awareness. ODIN combines radar and other sensors to detect vessels not broadcasting AIS and not easy to see with data delivered in NATO-standard formats. Uncrewed vessels can be part of the network too, meaning data points informing the map are many. It all combines to form an extremely accurate picture of activity across large bodies of water.

Rendition of the AI data coverage of ODIN

In 2026, Hefring was selected for NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, Challenge Programme. In September, it became one of 15 companies advancing to DIANA’s Mission Track, aimed at operational adoption. The programme can provide up to €300,000 (about $480,000 CDN) in funding and access to Allied navies, coast guards, testing facilities and procurement pathways. ODIN was recently demonstrated in Halifax and during Task Force X-Arctic, where results were streamed to the NATO Summit in Ankara. Things have gotten much busier for the group who originally were only studying the physics of ocean tour boats.

The Hefring Team

Hefring calls IMAS and ODIN “Marine Decision Intelligence.” It can help any vessel, from a tour boat to a frigate, see the future and steer clear of trouble. With AI analysing sensors, it’s like a second set of eyes for the boat, seeing through space and time and avoiding any trouble.