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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." .
Agreed, like sending out a billion dollars of computerized vessel and cargo to automatically sail the open seas without a human on board would be a costly mistake.
Where I think it might be good for efficiency to "automatically" sail, I'm guessing the loss of just one of these things when the automation fails in a way a human could easily fix will get at least one or two humans on board the next ship they send.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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.
The first vessel to be completely automated is legally the property of whoever gets on it first, per maritime salvage law. So yiu need a captain at a minimum. You also need someone who can fix the internet connection, another guy to tap the check engine light, etc, etc.
What about the cost to helicopter out repair crews when there any kind of break down?
That would be piracy. The boat isn't abandoned.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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..
they will have free rain.
Is there a place where pirates have to pay for water from the sky?
Yes, the water tax lords reign over them there.
They say, "hey, get your hands off my rain!".
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
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.
If no human is aboard the ship and it is in international waters, then it is by definition abandoned per maritime law.
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.
I do wonder about the requirement to keep a lookout at all times. I doubt cameras can substitute, expecially in bad conditions or when there are faults.
A caravan on deck for one human to keep it beyond salvage laws?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
No the ship is not abandoned.
Those "laws are abandoned" and changed since decades, if not even a century meanwhile.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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??
Nazi troll. Is that like a little blue-haired plastic doll with a swastika t-shirt? I'll ask your mom once she gets out of bed.
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