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Rolls Royce Developing Drone Cargo Ships
kc123 writes in with news that Rolls Royce is designing unmanned cargo ships."Rolls-Royce's Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway, that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel's bridge. Eventually, the London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless ships. Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says."
And drives it into a pier with many people.
I don't even know where to begin. The ocean is a harsh environment and ships work hard and maintenance and upkeep is a constant chore day in and day out both in port and while underway. The engineering crew is basically the travelling maintenance department. If the ship doesn't carry a crew, it will have to come out of service for maintenance and repairs, which means not only is it not making money, it's tying up an expensive berth in port. If it does break down while underway, how is anybody going to get to it? It could take days.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
Now all we need is a nuclear war...
The article is mainly about using telepresence and computers to pilot a ship. But other than piloting, what else do humans do, and how automatable is it?
For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way? During a storm, do people ever have to run around fixing chains that are working loose, or fix a leaking seal and set up pumps to pump out a flooded compartment?
I don't know the answers to the above questions, by the way. I don't know much about cargo ships.
Even if we still need humans for some tasks on a cargo ship, perhaps not too far in the future, we might have telepresence robots that can do the tasks.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And can ignore pesky mayday calls(at best relay) unless they have automatic human assistance, rations, medical stuff on board. It's handy having humans out there in emergencies imo.
There's no such thing anymore, Duke. These ships are totally computerized. They rely on satellite navigation, which links them to our network, and the virus, wherever they are in the world.
Are they planning to launch a series of satellites for this?
Anyone who has used a satellite uplink for the web can tell you that the bandwidth is oversold, and if you even try to stream video you get nailed by the FUP (fair use policy). It drops you to pre 56k modem speeds.
For a 360 panoramic with control and command monitored 24/7 you are looking at a lot of bandwidth streamed to space (or very long cables) to make it work.
It's kinda surprising that this would even be looked at as feasible.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
It's like they're inviting pirates to come aboard and have a little look around. And it would be pretty cool to camp out on a Chinese drone cargo ship as you cross the Pacific. Will this herald the rise of intercontinental hobos?
There was a T-Rex Onboard, and it did quite a bit of damage in L.A.
If someone boards an unmanned drone ship, wouldn't they be able to claim the ship as salvage and sell the contents?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Drone ships would have very little benefit compared to ships of today, and would save very little labor. That's because crew sizes are already negligible on modern ships. Ships require very little labor for their operation. For example, a massive containership like the Maersk Triple-E might carry 15,000 containers (equivalent to about 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads) while having a crew of 15, in three shifts. At any one time, there are 5 people transporting 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads of cargo. If we reduced those jobs, it would make very little difference to costs or anything else.
Bear in mind that three of the 15 positions are the engineering staff who are frequently performing physical operations on a massive engine. Those jobs will not go away by having a single captain for multiple ships.
The number of jobs on a ship is decreasing every year anyway, as ships gradually grow larger. Larger ships generally do not have larger crews, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo keeps dropping anyway. Large containerships today carry more than twice the cargo of ships from 20 years ago, while crew sizes have not grown, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo has dropped by half and continues dropping.
Labor costs are already an extremely small fraction of the costs of operating a ship. It would make little difference to reduce labor costs further.
and what about the welfare for the people automated out of there jobs?
Or will just be build more prisons to hold them (they do cover some things that the ER does not) USA only other places have better Health Care systems.
what about the person who has nothing to lose by makeing the ships crash or getting a big pay day to call it off?
The Somali's will be having a field day, the crews that are layed off not so much....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... If they want one, I've built these since 2009.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
You really hate washing machines and tractors too? How much human work is lost because of machines?
If we stay the course, we are dead! WE ARE ALL DEAD!
You really hate washing machines and tractors too? How much human work is lost because of machines?
Some ... for now. What happens when all of the ~4,000,000 truck drivers in the US are out of a job due to automation. Oh, they'll go to work fixing robots.Mmm hmm. As someone who has been doing controls systems engineering for the last 10 years, I can tell you that these systems are getting better all of the time. I used to get calls at night and on weekends a lot. Now, very few calls. The hardware and software tools and upgrades make it so that the system is very robust. Now, very few calls.
And those truck drivers? Well, I can tell you that the electrical technician's (we have about the same amount as we did 10 years ago) workload has also decreased. Motor brushes are going away. Bearings are becoming sealed, or automated grease systems installed. Breakers: now know when they are able to trip the load, they can isolate the load to the least affected area, and they can minimize the damage because they are so fast. Things last longer because of materials engineering and computer modelling. These guys just don't have that much to do anymore (Kaizen boards, and PRTs notwithstanding, that shit is just make-work).
And really, have you met many truck drivers? Some are very intelligent, but the vast majority have a boring mindless job for a reason.
Take automated cars for instance: Taxicab drivers out of a job. But not only that. Maybe I and my neighbors sign up for a service where a self driving car is called up and arrives where you are in a matter of minutes. I'm not going to buy another car, that's just a waste of money. Also, less cars on the road because they are operating all of the time. Think about how much time your car just sits there. (There's a job at Ford that I've contemplated applying for, but this gives me pause.) And then, less accidents. Bye bye insurance middleman. Bye bye auto body repair guy.Oh yeah, don't forget to apply for a job fixing robots. Bye bye garages. I'm sure our houses will just become bigger.
I could keep typing along these lines, but maybe you could put your mind to this line of reasoning and come up with many more examples. Seriously, the near term future is vastly different than what we've been experiencing. But in the long term, that's a good thing. And the long term future is radically different.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
They're smart people with transferable skills. They can find other jobs.
For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way?
Find someone who served in the Navy and ask them how much time is spent scraping and painting, wiping and oiling. Funny how that never makes it into TV commercials, well except for the Saturday Night Live spoof of a Navy commercial in the 70s.
I for one am planning a sex drone. Initially it will enable me to entertain the SO not only better but I will also be able to consume more ads. Eventually I expect the SO to follow my example and the drones will have superhuman sex which occasionally we will witness in awe. But we will double our capacity to consume ads. I vaguely get the feeling this droning makes me a bit of a tactic coward. Ah well, it all is in the name of cheerful progress I guess.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I don't see a big win here. It doesn't save that much labor. If it allowed using more small ships instead of giant ones, it might be worth something, but the economies of scale for post-Panamax container ships aren't really related to crew size.
Still, automated operations at ports have come a long way. Several big ports use big automated guided vehicles for container movement, and many container cranes are now fully automated. See this video for a modern port operation.
Castaways will never be pick up from now on.
But if the crew and even the captain can "remote in" to run the ship that means that they managed to build a perfect ship that won't need 24h maintenance, right?
I always thought the role of the whole crew was to take care care of the myriad of things that need constant attention a very large ship that is composed of thousands of subsystems, each with it's own weakness and degree of wear.
So how does adding a glorified RC module help here?
and what about the welfare for the people automated out of there jobs?
In 1900, about 80% of the people in the USA worked on farms. Today, it's more like 4% or less. They found other work.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The Rolls-Royce calculations show that there is a measurable saving in pollution by leaving off most of the crew support features. Fine - a potential saving exists. Now let's explore whether the saving is practical
Large ships do not turn suddenly - it can take miles and tens of minutes to turn a large tanker. You do not have to provide the captain with a real-time 360-degree virtual environment. You have to provide some sort of autonomous fail-safe in case communications are lost. You can have a one-time pad encryption for sending instructions, so remote hacking without a copy of the pad should be difficult if not impossible.
What if the ship gets into difficulties? We know the problems that conventional ships get into. It should be possible to calculate what fraction of these could be fixed by the crew at see, and factored into the potential saving. This is what the analysis should do. If you are in a storm, and a conventional container ship starts spilling its load, there is probably not much the crew can do other than hang on and wait for the storm to pass. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a small number of faults at sea could be fixed by flying out personnel to the ship and landing on the flat top of the containers, if nowhere else. So, you factor in the costs of a call-out.
Might work. Won't ever work if no-one's prepared to think about it, though.
that certainly seems like a good plan!
Just because occupations have popped up to replace these lost jobs in the past doesn't mean that they will in the future.
As machines become more and more capable, they can accomplish more and more of the things that previously only people could do, and will presumably tend towards being able to do anything a human could do. As we get closer to that point, it's quite possible there will be increasingly large sections of the population who find themselves effectively unemployable as there's very little they can do that cannot be done more cheaply by a machine.
It's nice to think that the new occupations will pop up to give us all something to do, but I think to believe that is basically an article of faith. I don't see any evidence that suggests it's guaranteed.
"$10M or your $LARGESUM ship and cargo land at the bottom of the ocean".
A strong armed response to these threats or acts will deter the rest of the pirates to do so again.
No civilian in the way, so...
... which was by Alcock and Brown in 1919, NOT Lindbergh in 1927, Brown had to walk out on the wings in a blinding snowstorm four times to clear ice from the carburettors and radiators.
But you don't get to hear much about that, because they're not American...
...Also, international law requires that every ship continuously maintains a "proper" watch by all possible means while at underway. Further, all ships are required to render assistance to any ship or crew in distress. An unmanned ship would by its very nature be unable to maintain a watch 24/7 or pull an injured crew from a liferaft....
A remotely piloted drone could easily be maintaining a better 24/7 watch around it than a piloted one.
And are submarines required to render assistance to any nearby ship in distress? I'll bet that they don't.....
Lies, lies. Lindbergh was the first person to fly the atlantic.
Or so the lessons went at my son's school in New Hampshire in the 1980's.
When I told them about Alcock & Brown no one believed me.
I showed them articles on the trip and gradually they started to understand.
When I showed them pictures of their landing site the accepted it.
Just like an exhibition about Vertical Flight at the Smithsonian. No mention of the Harrier VTOL aircraft yet not that far away the USMC were flying them daily.
History in the US is just like that in the USSR. It didn't happen unless a citizen of that country invented it.
NIH is alive and well.
Presumably a ship like this would have a much smaller (but non-zero) amount of structure dedicated to crew facilities, which would make it lighter, but that extra space would probably get filled with containers, basically nullifying that savings.
I don't know what percentage of the fuel burn is dedicated to ship electrical generation, but this seems trivial relative to the amount of fuel used to move it through the water.
You can bet everything you own on ships of war becomming robotic. And it is not just supply ships and the like but even more so ships in the line of battle could be far better without humans on board. Imagine a strange ship getting close to an enemy shore and launching hundreds of armed, aireal drones. The recent announcement that the US will shrink the number of troops in the armed forces simply reflects the intentions of having a highly automated, robotic, military on land, in air and on the seas.
No hostages is really a game changer there. I mean you can just pipe in narcotic gas from containers already onboard. Best case, the pirates wake up in prison. Worst case, not at all.
First solo flight is how they taught it in Vermont schools in the 80's.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Even more jobs taken from people and given to robots! Maybe soon robots will be in charge of giving jobs to robots. What could go wrong?
The plot of the movie "Hackers" is actually going to be real??? Finally!!!
So we need less reliable hardware so that plenty of people have jobs...? We need to kill off the trains so that truck drivers keep their jobs? ;-)
It wasn't so long ago that the computer (word processor) put hundreds of typists out of work. Email put hundreds of post-room workers out of a job. Yet still, we don't have vast settlements of out of work typists and posties.
I don't know what the future holds, or how we'll deal with it. What I can tell you is that during the Industrial Revolution here in the UK, the world seems so unbelievably scary that the majority of the working class were absolutely pickled on gin.
My point here is that sure, there were less people required to work in the fields than before, and sure, some of them were out of work. However, where formerly there been little market for gin, suddenly there was a massive market for it. Whilst I doubt there'll be truck driver jobs for long, there'll be some other spin-off job that will take off. The net is still less people in work, but some people who are pretty lowly today will suddenly find themselves getting rich. Those rich people will need something, and so the cycle goes on.
Sorry, I'm commenting to remove a bad mod (I'm sure I didn't click Redundant).
I love the idea of intercontinental hobos though. Containership Willy, riding the currents. Would their bindles be low power outboards?
What happens when all of the ~4,000,000 truck drivers in the US are out of a job due to automation. Oh, they'll go to work fixing robots.Mmm hmm.
Well, many of us have this idea that those truck drivers are creative, intelligent humans with dreams and aspirations. That, if they could feed their families, they would find an activity that lets them use that creativity and ambition. We've been moving in that direction for millenia: humans no longer required to dig holes for planting grain with their fingers, no longer required to carry rocks from the quarry by hand, type their own copies... We've always ended up better because of this, even though it's disruptive to the guys who were very comfortable collecting a check for their mindless routine. We moved from villages worth of manual farmers supporting as single wealthy manor lord to 2% of the population feeding everyone else. Most of the things people did with their new-found unemployment were unimagined before the technological disruption. Imagine trying to explain to a stone-age farmer what a "stoker" does, nevermind an assembly line.
Jobs of the future are going to be individual. There isn't going to be any need for people to act like cogs in a big machine, and there's going to be a lot less of thoughtlessly doing what the boss says. Let the displaced truck drivers stand up and take responsibility for themselves. The cost savings of all those automated trucks should let society give them time to find a new calling built of their own initiative.
Or maybe you think truck drivers aren't capable of any better or more "meaningful" work. That there are just a lot of people who aren't good for anything more than following simple instructions. This is what it always seems to me, when someone decries the loss of repetitive, menial jobs, and it's terribly depressing. It justifies turning our schools into minimum security prisons, because - after all - some people just can't learn. It justifies generational welfare, because - after all - some people just can't feed themselves. It's the white man's burden: those of us who can think for ourselves, and do have the initiative to build and grow, have an obligation to all those poor, incompetent, or genetically inferior people to just help them muddle along as best as possible, like a puppy or maybe a cat.
Rolls Royce is Derby (Derbyshire) based, not London based!
Why does this line of thought make me think of "Manhacks" from the Half Life series.
The first use of this might be for cargo ship convoys, instead of letting drones loose by themselves. I'm thinking that one or more new drone ships would tag along with a regular manned cargo ship, effectively increasing the capacity of the crew of the manned ship. The crew would be nearby for maintenance and emergencies. Remember that as with any new technology it would be phased in- the thousands of current cargo ships are not going to disappear overnight. If this technology is ever implemented, there will have to be a transitional phase where it coexists with current technology.
Then we send in the ninja monkeys.
Then in the Winter, the guerrillas simply freeze to death.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Coming soon to a port near you: The Exxon Valdez II crew-less supertanker. Controlled by a highly trained specialist at our support desk in Russia using WebEx ...
From what I understand of current maritime procedure you would have to have some kind of bridge. Whenever large ships enter narrow channels, canals or busy ports they are often taken over by port pilots. Its possible that you could rig the remote systems to take precedent over the on ship controls and harden the systems against tampering (basically put them in a safe next to the engine room) but you would probably need some kind of bridge.
John Trimmer's going to have a hard time on the next update of his book
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What about AMVER? What happens when somebody needs help at sea? Are their screens going to be able to pick out a small [relatively speaking] sailboat? Or one in distress? What happens when somebody hails the tanker to discuss which side they are going to pass on? Or they see a life raft in the water? This thing is going to stream a 360 HD view to somewhere else in realtime so they can keep a watch?
I'm sure the people on the cruise ship that one of these things has mowed into while navigating a dense fog bank with faulty radar will takes soloist in that fact as the drone ships engines continue to run at 50-80% for several minutes until the remote pilot/captain get the update image showing their prow buried in the side of another ship.
Somalia is designing software to pirate a drone cargo ship.
[
Kiss my shiny metal ass, meatbags.
I don't think civilian maritime salvage works that way. First off you don't get the ship/contents, you get a fee for recovery (10-30% of value of ship & cargo?). Secondly I think most maritime law requires that the ship be in peril or be a danger to others for salvage to kick in. A properly moored/anchored ship, even if unmanned would not be salvageable. But a ship that was just floating around with now crew would be as it could hit/be hit by other ships or wash ashore.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
You're dancing around the problem, although amusingly. We're making capital too efficient for all the labor that's being put out to pasture. We don't have the social welfare systems in place to eventually provide for the full lifestyle costs of 50% adult (work-age) unemployment. And we will NEVER have those systems in place, since it costs too much. Costs like that just drive capital away.
The Western World has to change. Predictably, it will only do so violently and at the last minute.
The first industrial revolution freed people from having to do muscle work in agriculture to go do muscle work in factories. The second industrial revolution freed people from doing muscle work to go do brain work (truck drivers for example work with their brains). The third industrial revolution is freeing people from doing brain work to doing... Well, what exactly?
In the short run we see people going from drone-like brain work like truck driving to doing slightly less drone-like brain work like salesmanship, but what happens if computers beat humans at that too? The only work that seems completely safe is work that is marketed as hand-made in order to appear more "genuine".
Just because occupations have popped up to replace these lost jobs in the past doesn't mean that they will in the future.
Any job that can be done by a machine should be done by a machine. The upshot of labor-saving technology is lower costs of whatever goods or services are produced.
I see no reason to eschew technology because of your fear of your impending incompetence.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
At least there will be jobs designing these automated systems and the chips they operate on for a while.
After that's done I'm sure someone will pay me to find a way to illegally take control of these robots.
Hey, a man has to eat.
Think of the chinese, indian, etc workers as the robots. Is it working out so well for the US workers so far? I don't think so. Even when manufacturing is brought back to the USA, far fewer long term jobs are created[1].
And guess what? Foxconn is busy replacing chinese workers with actual robots.
What will the chinese workers do? Some may take your higher end jobs, for 20% your pay: http://articles.latimes.com/20...
His performance reviews were impeccable, and his company considered him the best developer in the building.
Amazon is replacing warehouse workers with robots. There are burger making robots.
The cycle may go on, but it might be rather big and ugly cycle. The people at the top who'd own everything don't need that very many people to keep them happy - how many luxury goods designers and top chefs do they need anyway?
[1] You get some short term construction jobs to build the factories but even there are companies that build buildings quickly out of prefab (that can be made in more and more automated factories) - so the amount of human labour will go down. Buildings might even be 3D printed: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/3d...
p.s. I'm an IT worker in a 3rd world country. From what I gather, I cost less but I doubt I'm less capable than the average Slashdotter (the average quality appears to be dropping too ;) ).
salvage laws depend on imminent danger, not just on un manned, also salvage rights do not give you ownership of the vessel, just the right to compensation for rescuing the ship.
Once upon a time, the vast majority of people had to work hard just to provide food.
Improved farming technology has gotten this down to like 2% of the population, maybe less, freeing up the vast majority of people to do other things. The transition was not ideally smooth but overall we are better off now.
If we imagine a high-tech future with nanotechnology and AI, people won't need to drive vehicles or build stuff. If your home has a "fabber" that can just "print" a new mobile phone, all the workers in China who build phones now will go idle.
In that high-tech future, what should happen is that prices on everything fall to ridiculous levels. A house with solar panels on the roof and a nanotech fabber would be pretty independent and could make most of what the people in the house actually need, freeing them up to do stuff.
Already, right now, there are people who are making their living by cranking out short movies and putting them on YouTube. I can imagine a future where everyone is doing that sort of thing! On the one hand, it will be hard to be the most famous person of billions on the net; on the other hand, even a little bit of money would go a long way.
The alternative though is that government regulations screw up the economy. The fabber can make a mobile phone for you, but due to IP regulations it won't. (I mean, what if you used the fabber to make an unlicensed Mickey Mouse toy? The government must control what the fabbers can be allowed to do!) The money supply will be all screwed up and inflation will be crazy. In this scenario, everyone will still be out of work, but now they will be suffering. But once someone invents a nanotech fabber that can reproduce itself, good luck enforcing the IP regulations.
P.S. Some people think we will evolve past a need for money. Nonsense. The cost of many things should fall to near zero (why would I buy your widget when I can just "print" one in my fabber?) but we still need a way to decide who can attend a concert with limited seating, who can build a house on a particular plot of land, etc. And for all that: money.
When the oil runs out we will go back to a labor intensive economy. Teamsters and veterinarians for all those horses we will need to pull plows and haul wagons. Sailors for clipper ships. Lumber jacks to chop trees.
My dad grew up on a farm without electricity. He spent his teen years plowing with a mule. He remembers the Great Depression as the "good old days". If we can keep enough electricity for refrigeration and internet along with antibiotics and anesthetics a slower pace of life might be welcome. Now get of my lawn.
Just because occupations have popped up to replace these lost jobs in the past doesn't mean that they will in the future.
But it is firm evidence that they probably will. It's worth noting that the places with current long term employment problems have some sort of massive dysfunction in their societies. Either they're deeply corrupt or they systematically punish the act of employment.
Nothing in the future is guaranteed, but it seems foolish to discount how labor has been massively reallocated repeatedly over the past few centuries.
All good points.. but..
1) I absolutely hate taxi drivers. Especially when I get into a maniac's cab, and I feel my life is in their hands. They drive around in circles to creep up the meter. And they get pissed at you if you don't give them a big tip. So I would rather have a robot drive me around. Objective. Emotionless. Drama-less. And gets me to my destination safe and sound.
2) Truck drivers. They're also maniacs on the road. Not all, but enough are. The few bad apples makes me want to automate all of them out of a job. And besides, having automated trucks might make your goods cheaper, as hopefully, the automation of truck driving will making hauling goods around cost less.
3) Cars are super expensive to purchase, maintain, refuel, and insure. They represent a major percentage drain on everyone's annual net income. And because most areas of the United States needs a car to get around, then everyone is practically forced to have a car.
Most cities have pathetic public transportation, outside of New York City. Public transit is a total failure when it takes 2 to 3 hours to get to your destination.
And most cities do not want viable public transportation, such as Los Angeles. NIMBY'ism is alive and very powerful there.
And besides, only the poor and mostly ethnic people take the bus in major cities, like Los Angeles. Do you really want to be using your iPad and texting on your iPhone, when everyone else on that bus probably can't even afford a $50/month cell phone plan?
In San Francisco and New York, everyone from rich to poor, takes the public transit. So at least you have a heterogeneous mix of people from different classes that takes public transit. And NYC increased police patrols on public transit to at least help make it safer.
So maybe the best solution to the mass transit problem is to have robotic and automated cars. And if I can just call up a robotic car to drive me to work, then even better! I would no longer need to purchase a car, maintain it, refuel it, or insure it.
And as for all the people that were displaced by automated cars.. well, maybe they can get a construction job to repair the roads that all the robotic cars will be driving on. Well.. at least until the robots take over the road-repair construction jobs too..
I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of seamen from the Philippines will like this news.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
So, we could a different kind of piracy: piracy software.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.