UK maritime technology company Orca AI has commercially launched a new berthing assistance system developed with South Korean shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries, according to a company statement.
The system, called BerthView, combines Orca AI’s SeaPod digital watchkeeper with Samsung Heavy Industries’ SVISION berthing technology. It can be retrofitted to vessels already in service as well as installed across new fleets.
The launch takes the companies’ cooperation beyond open-water navigation into low-speed, close-quarters manoeuvring and the final stages of berthing.
BerthView uses fisheye cameras mounted on the bridge wings to create a 360-degree bird’s-eye view of the vessel and its surroundings. A standard installation has four cameras, with two on each bridge wing, while a six-camera configuration adds forward and aft views. The display provides distance markers, grid lines, electronic safety boundaries and warning zones to help bridge teams assess separation from berths, tugs, nearby vessels and other obstacles.
When AIS data is available, it can also display vessel identity, distance, speed and course.
The system records surround-view video on board and links navigational events with Orca AI’s FleetView cloud platform for incident investigation, claims support, crew training and analysis of recurring navigational risks.
The commercial launch follows a memorandum of understanding signed by Orca AI and Samsung Heavy Industries in April 2026 covering newbuild and retrofit applications.
Orca AI chief executive and co-founder Yarden Gross called the launch “an important step in turning our shared vision for autonomous shipping into a scalable commercial reality.”
Hyun Joe Kim, head of Samsung Heavy Industries’ Research Institute, said combining SVISION and the Samsung Autonomous System with Orca AI technology would extend intelligent navigation across more of a vessel’s voyage, including close-quarters manoeuvring and berthing.
The companies have not disclosed a launch customer, the number of vessels contracted for BerthView or pricing.
Orca AI was founded in 2018 by Yarden Gross and Dor Raviv. The London-headquartered company also has an office in Tel Aviv and says its technology operates on about 2,000 vessels and has accumulated more than 200m nautical miles of data.
Samsung Heavy Industries is a South Korean shipbuilding and offshore engineering company established in 1974. It had 10,646 employees and reported KRW 10.65trn ($7.96bn) in sales at the end of 2025, and develops commercial ships, offshore units and autonomous-navigation technologies.
