FarSounder merges AI radar and 3D sonar on one bridge screen

One screen for surface and seabed

On 14 May FarSounder and the software firm Tocaro Blue tied their systems together, so a single navigation display now carries both a radar read of the surface and a sonar read of the water ahead. FarSounder's Argos forward-looking sonar already maps the seabed and the water column out in front of the hull. Tocaro Blue's ProteusCore takes the yacht's existing radar and turns its returns into labelled objects, which then appear in the same SonaSoft LT window as the sonar picture.

The radar side is the part that is new to the yacht market. ProteusCore's models were trained on more than three million radar frames, and the software classifies what it sees rather than just painting blips: other vessels, including small craft that carry no AIS transponder, plus buoys and shorelines. An Autofocus function adjusts range and gain on its own as sea state and weather shift, work a watchkeeper would otherwise do by hand. John Minor, chief executive of Tocaro Blue, called the tie-up 'a natural fit to give mariners enhanced situational awareness.'

Why it matters on the owner's bridge

The selling point is not a new instrument but one fewer thing to look at. Argos sonar is a fixture on expedition and long-range yachts precisely because it warns of reefs, shoals and uncharted ground before the depth sounder does, reading the water out to about a thousand metres ahead. Until now that picture sat apart from radar and cameras, and the person on watch had to build the full scene by moving between screens.

Merging the two speaks to the quieter problem on a modern bridge, which is workload rather than raw capability. For an owner whose brief is remote cruising in poorly charted water, the risk that costs the most is grounding, and the one that surprises crew is the fast open boat that never shows up on AIS. Reading both in one window, without hunting across displays, is the kind of gain that shows up in insurance conversations and in how confidently a captain will take a yacht into thin water.

Sensor fusion, not autopilot

This is the second sensor FarSounder has folded into the same window. In September 2025 it brought in Sea.AI, whose cameras read heat and light above the waterline to flag vessels and floating objects, sitting alongside the sonar view of what lies below. The radar tie-up extends that pattern, and it arrives as the company works on machine reading of its own sonar returns, a project backed by a Rhode Island state innovation voucher in January 2026.

Two cautions belong on the buyer's list. None of this is autonomy: the systems classify and warn, while the watch still decides, a line every vendor in the space is careful to draw. And because these are software layers riding on radar, sonar and cameras a yacht may already carry, the questions for a yard are about integration and licensing rather than steel, which keeps the upgrade inside the scope of a refit rather than a new build.