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Rolls-Royce Wants To Fill the Seas With Self-Sailing Ships (wired.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: "Helsinki VTS, thank you for permission to depart," the captain says over the radio. He checks with the Vessel Traffic Service to see if there's anything to be looking out for. Just one other big ship, but also lots of small boats, enjoying the calm water, which could be hazards. Not a problem for this captain -- he has a giant screen on the bridge, which overlays the environment around his vessel with an augmented reality view. He can navigate the Baltic Discoverer confidently out of Finland's Helsinki Port using the computer-enhanced vision of the world, with artificial intelligence spotting and labeling every other water user, the shore, and navigation markers.
This not-too-far-in-the-future vision comes from Rolls-Royce. (One iteration of it, anyway: The Rolls-Royce car company, the jet engine maker, and this marine-focused enterprise all have different corporate owners.) The view provided to the crew of the (fictional) Baltic Discoverer is an example of the company's Intelligent Awareness system, which mashes together data from sensors all over a vessel, to give its humans a better view of the world. But that's just the early part of the plan. Using cameras, lidar, and radar, Rolls wants to make completely autonomous ships. And it's already running trials around the world.
"Tugs, ferries, and short-sea transport, these are all classes of vessels that we believe would be suitable for completely autonomous operations, monitored by a land based crew, who get to go home every night," says Kevin Daffey, Rolls-Royce's director of marine engineering and technology. Suitable, because they all currently rely on humans who demand to be paid -- and can make costly mistakes. Over the past decade, there have been more than 1,000 total losses of large ships, and at least 70 percent of those resulted from human error. [...] Moreover, the economic case for automating shipping is clear: About 100,000 large vessels are currently sailing the world's oceans, and the amount of cargo they carry is projected to grow around 4 percent a year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Beyond preventing accidents, human-free ships could be 15 percent more efficient to run, because they don't need energy-gobbling life support systems, doing things like heating, cooking, and lugging drinking water along for the ride.
This not-too-far-in-the-future vision comes from Rolls-Royce. (One iteration of it, anyway: The Rolls-Royce car company, the jet engine maker, and this marine-focused enterprise all have different corporate owners.) The view provided to the crew of the (fictional) Baltic Discoverer is an example of the company's Intelligent Awareness system, which mashes together data from sensors all over a vessel, to give its humans a better view of the world. But that's just the early part of the plan. Using cameras, lidar, and radar, Rolls wants to make completely autonomous ships. And it's already running trials around the world.
"Tugs, ferries, and short-sea transport, these are all classes of vessels that we believe would be suitable for completely autonomous operations, monitored by a land based crew, who get to go home every night," says Kevin Daffey, Rolls-Royce's director of marine engineering and technology. Suitable, because they all currently rely on humans who demand to be paid -- and can make costly mistakes. Over the past decade, there have been more than 1,000 total losses of large ships, and at least 70 percent of those resulted from human error. [...] Moreover, the economic case for automating shipping is clear: About 100,000 large vessels are currently sailing the world's oceans, and the amount of cargo they carry is projected to grow around 4 percent a year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Beyond preventing accidents, human-free ships could be 15 percent more efficient to run, because they don't need energy-gobbling life support systems, doing things like heating, cooking, and lugging drinking water along for the ride.
They dont have to deal with some captain who is armed.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Boy, it would be a bummer to be lost and adrift at sea and have one of these things cruise by a few thousand feet away from you.
Sheesh - I'm flashing back to Star Trek.
"DAYSTROM: You can't understand. You're frightened because you can't understand it. I'm going to show you. I'm going to show all of you. It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space or on some alien world. Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it."
"KIRK: There are certain things men must do to remain men. Your computer would take that away.
DAYSTROM: There are other things a man like you might do. Or perhaps you object to the possible loss of prestige and ceremony accorded a starship captain. A computer can do your job and without all that.
KIRK: You'll have to prove that to me, Doctor.
DAYSTROM: That is what we're here for, isn't it, Captain? "
Better start with the Mariana Trench.
Have gnu, will travel.
"humans ... can make costly mistakes." To err is human, but to make a real mess you need a computer.
so , we can replace most of the 7th fleet?
crashing into things seems to be their MO.
lets compare number of crashes pre/post automation.
Gee, that's pretty much naive beyond words. It's nice to know people this simplistic aren't in charge of nuclear arsenals... oh wait.
Will the ships be allowed to do anything to impede boarding? Human-crewed ships can at least argue self-defence, but what right does a piece of metal to risk any human, even a pirate?
So soon, there's going to be a rich job market opening up, just when automation puts lots of people out of work. Those captains of industry sure think of everything!
P.S. They'd probably put some humans there in a position similar to airplane pilots rather than go full AI.
They don't even have to have a ship - just sit at home, hack the controls and become a high-tech version of a Cornish wrecker. This could take online piracy to a whole new level.
Rolls Royce also launched a battery system that can power ships. They are really thinking ahead.
What about the cost to helicopter out repair crews when there any kind of break down?
Knowing how this sausage is made, I'm maybe impressed over the wrong things.
Pirate's under maritime salvage law will have an right and the
The burden of proof lies on the salvor, which means the salvor needs to prove real danger existed when the performance of service commenced. The court or arbitrators must determine whether the property was truly in danger. As every situation differs, both subjective and objective tests will be conducted. Common considerations are.
So if the pirates find a place where they can bribe the local court then they will have free rain.
I wonder how much of shipping costs are due to human labor and onboard living facilities and life support and how much are due to fuel costs and capital costs of ships, docks, etc. Fuel is definitely a major factor and it may become economical to slow autonomous ships down (which uses substantially less fuel) but requires more ships to move the same amount of goods per year.
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Let's say 1000 automated cargo freighters.
Typical ship has a crew compliment of 22 - 27 (https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-typical-crew-of-a-cargo-ship-composed-of) with an average salary of $73,590 per year (https://work.chron.com/average-salary-workers-deep-draft-vessels-7101.html)
So 1000 x 22 x $73,590 = 1,618,980,000 (yep, those zeros are correct) Let's just say 1.6 billion per year to pay crew.
That's not counting food (they have to eat out there), kitchens, facilities, etc, etc. So the actual cost is even higher. Now I guess you'd have to weigh that against the cost of sending a helicopter and a specialist crew in the event of a problem, but 1.6B+ would probably pay for quite a few emergencies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If your ship is crewed by on-site staff, they may work an 8 hour shift, but they're basically on-call the other 16 hours. They're paid a slight premium for this, say 50%. So you're essentially getting the work of 3 employees for the cost of 1.5 since the crew is there mostly to take care of emergencies, not actually doing stuff all the time.
If your ship is "crewed" remotely by staff which go home every night, you'll need three 8-hour shifts. Increasing personnel costs by 2x.
Any labor savings is going to come from automation (i.e. eliminating human jobs) and improving reliability. Not by moving the crew off the ship. The engineer (mechanic) is along for the ride "just in case" the engines break during the voyage. If you can get engine reliability high enough, it may be an acceptable risk to forego the engineer. i.e. The rate at which you lose ships due to mechanical breakdown costs less than the payroll of having an engineer aboard every ship. You can't eliminate him in a crewed ship because the other crew will die if the ship is lost due to a breakdown. But if the ship is uncrewed, then your only losses from a breakdown are financial.
Heating and cooking are trivial. The ship has got huge diesel engines running 24/7 generating copious amounts of waste heat. Diesel engines on this scale are about 50% efficient. Half the energy in the fuel goes into propelling the ship. The other half becomes waste heat. The problem is getting rid of heat, not generating it (if the cooling system breaks down, the ship is dead in the water until it's fixed). Likewise, the amount of drinking water needed by a crew (about 2-4 kg per day per person) is inconsequential to the cargo capacity of the ship. Heck, if you needed you could add a bleed valve to a pressurized raw water coolant line, and venting it would cause the superheated water to flash boil, which if run through a rudimentary still would produce pure drinkable water when condensed.
The accident reduction part I could agree with, though I wonder if without having lives on the line, people might engage in riskier behavior which leads to more accidents, not fewer. I'll note that the Exxon Valdez accident happened because the company didn't want to pay to fix the radar. That kind of skimping is more likely to happen if people's lives aren't on the line, not less.
If what I read a while back was true the US Navy is already ahead on automated ships. The idea was something like an old battle barge with limited propulsion and water sloshing over the decks. It would be towed into place by a large war ship and set free for the last two or three hundred miles. It would stop at a pre determined location and wait for the weapons to be used if need be. I do not know the degree to which it is a drone or if it can attack without any human contact. Being unmanned, the danger to seamen is vastly reduced as well as this war machine not needing to carry food and sleeping areas etc..
Aren't ocean ships crew already quite small and limited by maintenance work that has to be done?
Could you imagine what would happen if every harbor pilot went on strike at the same time?
Yeah, I can imagine what would happen.
Remote-piloting.
You're not going to out-nazi the Trump administration, grab some prison pine, meat.
Meh, on the plus side the press gangs can finally stop getting young people drunk in bars, dropping a shilling in the glass, and then forcing them while still drunk to join the crew.
That, uh, still happens right?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I thought they tried this in the movie I stared in some years ago, when we discovered the work in the trash bin..
The ocean is a pretty rough environment, where a lot can and does go wrong. That's where people do well and computers and automation does poorly.
What happens when your fancy sensors short out, ice over, get smashed, rust up, seize up, and otherwise f-up? What happens when you run aground, or collide, or are boarded? What happens in a gale when you are no longer getting understandable visual feeds? What is the procedure when your radar fails, your GPS isn't working, your lidar system goes offline? What if your engines quit and power is lost?
Automation is great for predictable, controllable situations. The more environmental unpredictability, the greater difficulty (and therefore cost, and practicality) of automating a system. Trains are therefore highly automatable, cars less so, ships still less, and airplanes perhaps least of all.
They can prove me wrong and may well do so. But it's up to Rolls-Royce to impress us all, or die trying.
As a malicious user I love the idea of being able to remotely pilot a Qmax lng tanker into my target. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that. Not a thing.
What's more, the infrequency of this type of event, plus the geographic remoteness might allow them to offload the cost completely to service organizations that take on contracts to repair stranded robot ships. You don't keep a full time staff on board to go fix the ship, you have a standing retainer with a series of service orgs that can get to a ship along its route.
human-free ships could be 15 percent more efficient to run, because they don't need energy-gobbling life support systems, doing things like heating, cooking, and lugging drinking water along for the ride.
How do you fulfill your shipwrek victim rescue duties, when your ship cannot support life?
Many places are out of helicopter range using the average helicopter. There have been a small number of Transatlantic flights and Transpacific flights. Those are done with refuelling, special configurations, or taking short flights across.
Most likely a repair crew will be flown to a nearby port and then take a fast ship out to the ship that has the problem.
I must say, I grew up in the '80s. I got tours of airplane cockpits. I saw lots of buttons. Never did I think that in the future there'd be MORE controls. Technology promised to remove clutter, to make things simpler.
It hasn't.
Being able to see every vessel and marker and shoreline around you doesn't make things easier. It makes things harder. Automating with more information just shifts the hard to setup, installation, configuration, planning, maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair.
Explain to me how ten-thousand ants can stream through a tiny crack in my kitchen wall. Explain to me how hen-thousand bees can work together in a single hive. Explain to me how fifty-thousand humans can fill and empty a baseball stadium. thousands of small birds. mosquitoes. schooling fish. flocks, schools, pods, herds, murders.
In every existing system, many millions of years old, there is no augmented reality. There is wide-angle overview. They all work brilliantly.
If your system requires more information to be present, then it's not the better solution. Here's hoping it gives you a better perspective on the better solution. ...and if you're anything like me, you're picturing bumper boats, bumper ferries, and bumper cruise ships!
That would be one way to help partially address some of the sources of climate change, and at the same time address any possible future where fossil fuels aren't as cheap to obtain reliably. That would be more forward-looking. Too bad.
The biggest cargo ship in operation at the moment is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
180kt.
It has a crew of 31. Assuming the crew consists of 100kg heavy hard working muscle men, they would weight 3.1t.
Considering that hot water usually is made from waste heat of the engines, and cooking is done with gas stoves or electric, considering that the ship probably carries 100 times more water as ballast than freshwater for the crew, it is in no way plausible that such a small crew in relation to the size of the ship and cargo would save 15% fuel. They hardly will need so much light aka electricity for their TVs and room lighting either ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Your salary figured are overestimated, they are actually closer to ten percent of that for ninety percent of the crew. Most vessels are not flagged as US vessels so using US salary averages is absurd beyond belief. Long haul trans oceanic crews might get 20% of your figure which includes flag staff American wages. Which also sucks considering it is a 24/7 gig since you can't go home to the wife and kids after your shift.
Well, I can't argue the US vs other country salaries. I'm only have the (US) website information to go by. But it's an 'average' salary for the entire ship crew. The captain and engineers obviously make considerably more, where as basic sailors receive considerably less. It only takes one high paid man at the top to skew the average when your crew size is as small as 22.
A 1000 ship estimate is also a small fraction of the 100,000 estimated large ships in service. Even with a smaller average salary estimate, the true number of ships that could some day benefit would be much longer. Indeed, with the cost savings, eventually all freighters would be forced to go crew-less just to compete. I stand by my estimate, which is probably on the low side.
Speaking of sails, I do remember /. had some article a few months ago about a solar sailboat. I guess it could be interesting if useable for big things.... but I feel like I remember it looking to be about the size of a speed boat and the entire thing was covered in solar panels. Might be a bit much for anything other than a small passenger boat.
The solar may be helpful in some respects (like providing the power for the life-support systems on the ship), but I'm talking about a return to classic sail cargo ships like used for all shipping before motorized ships became popular.
I did a quick search and was glad to find some articles confirming that many people are indeed thinking about exactly these things:
https://www.machinedesign.com/...
https://www.popularmechanics.c...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
What are we going to do with all the extra seamen??
Here's something that you could do on a ship, autonomous or not. At the highest point on the ship (crows nest) you could have high-powered telescopes with video and A.I. analysis constantly scanning the horizon for people in disabled/life boats.
J