Design and Development of Low Cost Navigation and Security System for Indian Fishermen

The fishing industry plays a major role in the development of Indian economy. The recent attacks on fishermen taking place in Indo-Srilanka and Indo-Pakistan maritime boundaries have been major concerns. These attacks are primarily caused by the lack of navigation and security features during the voyage. Hence the current situation demands the implementation of precise facilities for reducing man and material loss.

The design and implementation of a Low cost Navigation and Security System for Indian fishermen on Arduino Nano platform are described. The system developed solves the above mentioned issues by continuously tracking the location of fishing vessel and providing minimal security features. The system ensures that navigation is in safe zone within the nation's maritime boundary and also prevents crossover. This is acheived using GPS receiver which directly links to GPS satellites for current location of the vessel. The required data fields such as the latitude and longitude data along with the time stamps are extracted from the GPS samples and used for determining the exact location of the vessel. The Proposed method aids in the detection of corner cases when the vessel is nearing or about to crossover for the maritime boundary, which cannot be marked physically. The method is useful for triggering conditions such as enabling or disabling the fuel injection system, the warning beeps and display notifications to the fishermen. Manual override facility for restarting the engine in case of crossover for limited duration is provided. The security features such as authentication for the genuine operator to get access to the engine panel, the support for distress message and the storage of the exact time stamps and GPS locations after encryption in case of initiation of transmitting distress message is provided as a blackbox feature. A password based mechanism allows a maximum of three attempts to unlock access to the control panel. The GSM modem allows for transmission of distress message to the registered base station/coast guard. The encrypted GPS samples and the time stamps are stored in the on-chip EEPROM memory for future reference.