DEMO: Maritime Situational Awareness – A Modular Lightweight Sensor Rack
We present a live demonstration of a lightweight and modular multi-sensor rack designed for maritime situational awareness applications. The system integrates four synchronized cameras, a 360° LiDAR, dual GPS antennas, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver into a transportable structure that can be quickly mounted on chartered vessels. The design emphasizes portability, robustness, and modularity, enabling flexible deployment for both research and operational use. During the demonstration, the rack will be displayed in its operational configuration, with attendees able to inspect the hardware and discuss integration aspects. In addition, we will present a 15-minute dataset snippet collected in the Adriatic Sea using this platform, showing vessel encounters in marinas, coastal passages, and open-water environments. Finally, we will demonstrate prototype situational awareness algorithms that fuse multi-sensor data for vessel detection, classification, and trajectory estimation, offering insight into how the platform can support autonomy, surveillance, and safety-related applications. The session will be interactive, allowing attendees to explore the hardware setup, examine data samples, and discuss use cases ranging from academic research to applied maritime engineering.