Marine Innovation at FLIBS: AI, Safer Boating and Cleaner Maintenance
As FLIBS 2026 approaches, three more nominees from the 2025 Marine Research Hub Innovation & Sustainability Awards demonstrate that meaningful progress in boating can come from very different places, from artificial intelligence and trailer guidance to cleaner maintenance products and alternatives to traditional antifouling.
When the marine industry talks about innovation, attention naturally gravitates towards the technologies that are easiest to see: new vessels, electric propulsion, alternative fuels, autonomous systems and increasingly ambitious engineering. Yet some of the changes capable of making boating safer, easier and more sustainable are far less dramatic in appearance, even when their impact on the everyday experience of being on the water could be significant.
That is what makes this second group of companies revisited from the 2025 Marine Research Hub Innovation & Sustainability Awards particularly interesting. As the industry prepares for the 2026 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show and the fourth annual awards, the work of SEA.AI, ZF Marine and Eco Safeway offers a much broader view of what marine innovation can actually mean in practice.
SEA.AI is teaching technology to watch the water when a human being cannot, ZF Marine is applying software to one of the least glamorous but most stressful parts of recreational boating, and Eco Safeway is questioning whether the products used to clean and protect vessels need to introduce unnecessary chemicals into the environment in the first place. There may be no single technology connecting them, but there is a common instinct behind all three: identify a recurring problem within boating, understand why it continues to exist, and find a better way of dealing with it.
Marine Innovation at FLIBS: When the Human Eye Is Not Enough
Marine navigation has always depended heavily on awareness, and the more crowded or challenging the environment becomes, the more important it is for a skipper to understand what is happening around the vessel. That becomes considerably harder when visibility deteriorates, when objects are small or partially submerged, or simply when the person at the helm is concentrating on another task and cannot continuously monitor every screen onboard.
SEA.AI approaches that problem through machine vision, combining thermal imaging, colour sensors and artificial intelligence to detect, classify and alert operators to objects on the surface of the water, including vessels, debris, containers and other hazards that may be difficult to identify visually, particularly at night or in poor conditions.
The important distinction is not simply that there is another camera onboard, because a conventional camera is still dependent on somebody looking at it at the right moment. As Diogo Arreda explains during the 2025 conversation, SEA.AI uses artificial intelligence to monitor what the sensors are seeing continuously and alert the operator when something requires attention, turning the technology from a passive viewing device into an active layer of situational awareness.
That difference becomes particularly important in a marine environment where the consequences of missing something can extend well beyond damage to a vessel. SEA.AI says its systems can detect not only boats and floating hazards, but also whales and dolphins, bringing safety and environmental protection into the same conversation rather than treating them as unrelated objectives.
Preventing a collision can mean avoiding injury and costly vessel damage, but it can also mean preventing fuel or oil spills, reducing the risk of harm to marine life and avoiding the wider environmental consequences that can follow an incident on the water. In that sense, the technology illustrates how marine safety and sustainability often overlap far more than industry categories might suggest.
The company’s Watchkeeper system also reflects another increasingly important characteristic of modern marine equipment: the ability to continue improving after installation. SEA.AI has been collecting data for years, and continued software and algorithm updates mean the system can evolve as that data grows, allowing the intelligence behind the hardware to improve without requiring the entire physical product to be replaced.
ZF Marine Looks Beyond the Engine Room
ZF Marine is much more readily associated with transmissions, controls, propulsion systems and the mechanical components that move vessels through the water, which makes the development of RampAssist particularly revealing because the idea did not begin with another gearbox or propulsion product. Instead, a small internal technology team asked what frustrations ordinary boaters were experiencing and whether ZF’s engineering and software capability could be applied somewhere completely different.
The answer was the boat ramp.
It may not be the most glamorous part of boating, but anyone who trailers a vessel understands how quickly a day on the water can become frustrating when a ramp is closed, unsuitable, overcrowded or unfamiliar. RampAssist was developed around that reality, bringing together information on more than 24,000 ramps so users can locate facilities based on geography while also accessing information about amenities, ratings and the times at which a ramp is likely to be busiest.
At first glance, that may sound more like convenience than sustainability, yet the wider consequences are easy to understand. Driving from one unusable or overcrowded ramp to another wastes fuel, time and energy, while repeated negative experiences can eventually discourage people from using their boats regularly at all. By reducing some of that friction, ZF is addressing both the practical experience of boating and the unnecessary waste created when that experience goes wrong before the vessel even reaches the water.
The app also incorporates weather and tide information, bringing safety considerations into the same platform, while its patented trailer guidance system uses the camera on a mobile device together with object recognition, visual guidance and audible warnings to help direct a boat safely onto its trailer.
For somebody new to boating, that matters because loading a vessel onto a trailer is a learned skill, and it can become one of the more intimidating parts of the experience when wind, current, visibility, unfamiliar equipment and the pressure of other people waiting at the ramp all become part of the situation at once. By adding both guidance and recording capability, RampAssist can function not only as an immediate aid but also as a training tool, helping boaters review what happened and become more competent over time.
There is a useful lesson in that approach because innovation does not always require creating an entirely new category of marine technology. Sometimes it begins by looking at a familiar frustration that the industry has simply accepted for years and deciding that it should no longer be quite so difficult.
Cleaner Chemistry Is Still Marine Technology
Eco Safeway approaches sustainability from yet another direction, focusing on an area of boating that rarely receives the same attention as propulsion or navigation but has a direct relationship with the marine environment: routine vessel maintenance.
There is nothing particularly futuristic about cleaning a boat, yet the products used across marinas, boatyards and privately owned vessels do not disappear once the job is finished. What goes down a drain, over the side or through a marine system eventually has to go somewhere, which makes the chemistry behind those products part of the wider sustainability conversation whether it is marketed that way or not.
Eco Safeway develops clean marina compliant products around that reality, including phosphate-free cleaners designed for applications ranging from AC flushing and raw-water systems to black-water descaling. The underlying idea is straightforward but important: a cleaning product still has to perform properly, but effectiveness should not automatically require unnecessary environmental harm.
Tristan Contas describes the company’s approach as combining safety, sustainability and practical performance within the same product range, rather than treating those goals as competing priorities, and that philosophy becomes even more interesting when the conversation turns to Finsulate.
Traditional antifouling has long involved a difficult environmental compromise because marine growth has to be controlled if a vessel is to remain efficient, yet many conventional coatings achieve that result through biocides designed specifically to discourage organisms from attaching to the hull. Finsulate approaches the problem differently, using a fibre wrap applied to the hull to prevent barnacles and other marine growth from establishing themselves rather than relying on a traditional chemical antifouling coating.
According to the company, the material is biocide-free, chemical-free and made from recyclable nylon, while also reducing the need to repeatedly haul the vessel for bottom painting. The significance of that extends beyond the coating itself because hull condition directly influences vessel efficiency. Hard fouling increases resistance as a boat moves through the water, which can raise fuel consumption and reduce performance, meaning that keeping the hull clean is not merely cosmetic maintenance but part of the vessel’s overall energy equation.
That is where the environmental argument becomes much more complete. Sustainability in boating is rarely determined by one decision taken in isolation; the chemicals used during maintenance, the frequency with which a vessel must be hauled, the materials consumed during that process and the additional energy required when the hull becomes heavily fouled all contribute to the overall footprint. Changing one part of that system can therefore influence several others at the same time.
The Less Obvious Side of the Blue Economy
SEA.AI, ZF Marine and Eco Safeway could hardly be more different as businesses, with one working in artificial intelligence and machine vision, another operating within one of the marine sector’s most established propulsion and driveline companies, and the third focused on cleaning products, hull maintenance and alternatives to conventional antifouling. Yet their differences are precisely what make them useful examples of why the idea of a sustainable Blue Economy has to extend far beyond the technologies most likely to dominate headlines.
A safer vessel can also be a more sustainable vessel when technology helps prevent collisions, spills and damage to marine life, while a better boating experience can contribute to the same goal when software reduces wasted journeys, improves safety and helps people become more competent users of their equipment. In the same way, a cleaning product becomes part of the marine innovation conversation when it is designed around what happens after that product leaves the bottle and enters the surrounding environment, just as an antifouling system deserves scrutiny when it seeks to reduce chemical reliance without sacrificing the efficiency required to keep a vessel moving properly through the water.
None of these advances is likely to dominate a boat-show skyline, but that does not make them insignificant. In many ways, this kind of incremental improvement is exactly how industries change, through hundreds of decisions about whether a familiar process can become safer, cleaner, easier or more efficient without compromising the practical reason it existed in the first place.
Looking Back While the Next Group Moves Forward
These conversations were recorded during FLIBS 2025, when SEA.AI, ZF Marine and Eco Safeway were among the companies being recognised through the Marine Research Hub Innovation & Sustainability Awards, and revisiting them a year later provides more than a reminder of who was nominated. It creates a record of the problems companies were trying to solve, the technologies they were bringing to market and the way sustainability was already becoming embedded within decisions that might once have been considered purely operational.
The 2026 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show runs from October 28 to November 1, bringing the marine industry back to South Florida while the Marine Research Hub Innovation & Sustainability Awards return for their fourth year. The awards are intended to recognise companies, organisations and individuals connecting innovation with sustainability across the marine industry, not only through high-profile technologies but through practical solutions capable of improving how vessels are operated, maintained and experienced.
That broader definition matters because, if the industry is serious about reducing its environmental impact while continuing to grow, innovation will have to happen everywhere. It will happen in propulsion systems and vessel design, certainly, but it will also happen in navigation, software, maintenance, materials, marinas, supply chains and the countless everyday processes that collectively shape life on the water.
SEA.AI, ZF Marine and Eco Safeway are three very different examples of what that can look like, and while their technologies may not share a category, the question behind each is remarkably similar: can we take something the marine industry already does and find a way to do it better?
That is often where meaningful innovation begins.
The Marine Research Hub Innovation & Sustainability Awards have been supported by Allini Water Filters, DeAngelo Marine Exhaust, Total Marine Solutions, Informa Markets and the Marine Industries Association of South Florida, helping provide a platform through which emerging ideas and established companies alike can receive recognition for work advancing the marine industry and the wider Blue Economy.
────────────────────────
PRESENTED BY
MARINE RESEARCH HUB
────────────────────────
The Marine Research Hub of South Florida connects the region’s marine industry, research institutions and wider Blue Economy, supporting collaboration, innovation and the development of solutions addressing the challenges and opportunities facing our oceans and marine industries.
Comments