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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.
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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.
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Modern pirates make most of their money by kidnapping and ransoming crews. If there is no crew, there is far less incentive to board the ship.
In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
On the other hand, you aren't going to get much of a ransom for a satellite modem and a half-rack of control gear, no matter how menacing and willing to kill the hostages you look... Also, even crewed vessels of any significant size are usually wearing a beacon of some type, and if the cops are days away, so to is the nearest possible buyer for the cargo.
(Probably more relevant, with the exception of, quite atypical, security contractors brought on out of necessity for very, very, bad neighborhoods, it is usually not within the power, or the job description, of the crew to fight pirates. A drone would probably be incrementally less able to get really pissed off and make a dead hero of himself with the ships' highest-power fire hose; but that's about it.)
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!
One image per 5 minutes is probably more than enough for virtually all ships, since they move so slowly, and since there's no point in breaking for something you detect faster than that. Once something interesting shows up, you increase the update frequency to 1 image per minute, and so on until you reach real-time streaming. Also, since most of the sea isn't changing, you can also filter out almost all of the picture when the update is sent.
You could even trigger the change in update frequency with sensors, such as radar, sonar or infra red (for pirates).
I bet someone has already patented this obvious answer...
It's awesome to know that nothing will ever go wrong in five minutes.
Altho, it's amazing that all captains who had at least five minutes to respond to everything ever lost a ship.
It's going to be awesome to have the best new captains who can respond to everything with five minute breaks during their shift! Thank you for your insight! You are exactly what I expect from anon cowards! I bow to your creativity!
_ _ _ 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.
in containers that aren't labelled, stacked 5 high and 10 wide [or more], where you would have to move most containers to be able to actually open them to see inside, nevermind the whole "in the middle of the ocean without a road in sight" thing.
and while it could be fairly easy to disable remote control of the ship [by physically destroying/disconnecting the antenae/satellite dish], and they can kill the engine, it may not be that easy to get control of the ship to get it to shore in a reasonable [for the pirate] way.
maybe it will become a 'give us money or we'll sink it' thing?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
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.
And you forget about the ever-present dockworkers unions, that note what goes in each container, and where it is located... this might make things much easier for the mafias.
That said, the biggest offense is that our wealthy and powerful are continually trying to find ways to eliminate -- and put to death -- the very people who have supported them.
In other words, they are traitors.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.
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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.