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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.
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
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?
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!
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.
I suspect that no shipping company spokesperson, or cargo ship supplier, would get within a mile of a live mic while saying so; but do you think they'd shed too many tears if tragically certain sorts of (expensive, delay-inducing, largely unrewarding) rescue missions were simply no longer within their capabilities?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... If they want one, I've built these since 2009.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I would think no crew would make life harder for the pirates. Currently they can take the crew hostage which means they can force (at gunpoint) the crew to tell them how to operate the ship, and it also means that attempting to recover the ship by force puts the crews life at risk.
With a crewless ship I'd it would be much harder for the pirates to take control of the ship and much easier for a recovery team to take it back off them without getting any "good guys" killed.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I think you left out a word---the Somali's what? And to which Somali do you refer? (Last I heard there were quite a few of them.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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 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.
The pirates would also have no way of controlling the ship. They'd just be along for the ride while the coastguard waits for them to sail past.
All they could do is disable it. With no way to easily take any cargo either.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ...
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?
Somalia is designing software to pirate a drone cargo ship.
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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.
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."
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.
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.