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Forget all your nautical knowledge and fire your navigator, because it's time for self-driving boats:
When it comes to autonomous vehicles why stop on land when you can expand to the seas? That's the thinking of MIT and Amsterdam's Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute). The two groups announced on Monday that they have joined forces to create the cleverly named Roboat to explore the possibilities of creating self-driving boats.
The boats would be used for a variety of functions, including transporting people and goods, but would also be capable of much more. "Imagine a fleet of autonomous boats for the transportation of goods and people," says Carlo Ratti, professor at MIT and principal investigator in the Roboat-program in a statement announcing the partnership, "but also think of dynamic and temporary floating infrastructure like on-demand bridges and stages, that can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of hours."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 20 2016, @02:12PM
How many motor boat lanes are as congested as the average highway to work? Seriously, how often do you have to wait in line behind four other boats to pump gas or diesel? How many 4-way stops have you seen out on the water?
Geez, Louise, an ancient 286 computer is more than you need for most boat traffice. An 8080 might be sufficient.
Want a real challenge? Make it cheap enough that a new boat buyer doesn't even notice the cost. He's paying for radar, sonar, GPS, lidar, and whatever else anyway. Just tie all that crap into the computer, then let the computer decide how fast to go on which heading. No apparent extra cost, just build it all together.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 20 2016, @02:44PM
That kind of stuff is a big problem for container ship size boats around harbors and canals. Not an issue for bass fishing boats.
Big boats are like jetliners where you have to control the things like ten minutes into the future all the time because they're not very maneuverable.
One thing that's huge fun for sailors is charts are never up to date due to rain outwash or whatever so even if you "stay in the channel" you always have to play a judgment game with water depth. I guess its like offroading more than onroading.
Another huge fun for smaller boats is a large part of successful boating is knowing when you shouldn't be out there.
Something interesting about boats vs cars is you spend a lot of time (compared to cars) around the same boats. So technically legally I could cut off that sailboat, but I've been watching him for the last 45 minutes and he's not good at tacking and my own experience sailing indicates the weather is not improving so I better cut this particular boat a little slack. I have no idea how continuous evaluation of your fellow boaters will get programmed. Most cars assume the drivers are competent, but a lot of boaters are not, or they're lazy, or their boat is in bad shape, or they just don't like pushing the limits of performance. OR rephrased cars are high enough performance now a days that they all always operate right at the legal limit, but boats almost never do and usually don't operate at their technical limit either (unless the operator is drunk so you have to assume they're doing stupid stuff instead)
A small boat computer is going to spend all its time telling the captain when its too dangerous to go out and hot dogging barely legally is a bad idea, whereas the large boat computer is going to spend all its time thinking about how not to hit things despite being poorly maneuverable and every harbor is tightly packed to a big enough boat.