In January, the British firm Automated Ships and its Norwegian partners Kongsberg Maritime will begin work on the first offshore vessel that can be run with no captain, crew, or engineers.
The ship, named the Hrönn, is being designed as an offshore support vessel capable of delivering cargo to remote locations, launching and retrieving unmanned submersible craft, and acting as a resupply vessel for North Sea oil rigs. It will be launched next year and, pending successful sea trials, will be certified for offshore use the following year.
"The advantages of unmanned ships are manifold, but primarily center on the safe-guarding of life and reduction in the cost of production and operations; removing people from the hazardous environment of at-sea operations and re-employing them on-shore to monitor and operate robotic vessels remotely; along with the significantly decreased cost in constructing ships, will revolutionize the marine industry," said Automated Ships MD Brett Phaneuf.
The shipping industry is keener than its automotive cousins to get robot ships running commercially. The industry has been revolutionized by containers, which slashed the cost of shipping goods, and is now hoping for similar savings by taking humans out of the equation, or helping to augment them.
Sigh. There goes your bright future at sea.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:00AM
Star Trek covered this. Klingons attack robot ships transporting grain to Sherman's Planet.
Oh right. No one ever watched The Animated Series.
Carry on, morons!
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:17AM
The Animated Series did the Niven story where a Slaver Stasis box had a spy's screwdriver. Click once, it dug holes. Click twice, it was a laser, etc etc etc.
Got Netflix a couple years back, first thing I searched for was that ep.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 05 2016, @07:28AM
Was the spy actually a doctor? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Snotnose on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:13AM
It would save more money to automate the loading/unloading of ships. Dockworkers make an obscene amount of money for what they do, and they seem to like going on strike every few years.
Notice how I can rail about H1-Bs taking my job, but blissfully claim AI should take dockworkers jobs. Being able to hold both viewpoints in my head is what makes me an American :)
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:30AM
On the contrary, drone ships provide job opportunities for recent veterans who never saw real combat, because they worked as video game console operators and bombed brown people on another continent while staying safely out of harm's way themselves.
Stargate ran an episode about how using remote controlled unmanned drones against manned targets is immoral and the people engaging in remote drone warfare are war criminals worse than Hitler. O'Neill slammed the iris in their faces when he found out what they were doing.
Of course that was fiction. In reality we call war criminals Americans.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:56AM
If the government decided to put dockworkers out of work by setting up a program to import cheap foreigners, and then exempt those workers from labor laws, there would be riots.
People getting put out of work by robots just frees up those people to do other productive work. Work that can be done by robots should be done by robots. Work that can only be done by people should be done on a level playing field.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 05 2016, @02:09AM
Prostitution, drug dealing, and subsistence farming.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @04:34AM
Sounds like my resume. You hiring?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:36AM
You've got to have a lot of faith in your computers to put tens/hundreds of millions of dollars out to sea without a human aboard. Faith - or just crazy. The unexpected WILL HAPPEN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:50AM
And, also a lot of faith in the machinery on the ship. Big ships that I know about all have onboard engineers/mechanics and well stocked repair/machine shops.
(Score: 2) by Username on Saturday November 05 2016, @02:27AM
Well, they’re not like planes that will drop out of the sky if the motor goes out. They can just float there until a maintenance ship comes to fix them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bobs on Saturday November 05 2016, @12:36PM
They can just float there until a maintenance ship comes to fix them
Unless it is near the shore, or in a storm or the electrical systems go offline and you no longer know where it is.
Here’s hoping they christen it the “Murphy"
(Score: 2) by Username on Saturday November 05 2016, @08:11PM
Unless it is near the shore
Then it beaches itself like any other ship would that suffers the same problem near shore.
in a storm
There is nothing alive on the ship, doesn’t need windows or vents, just a few water tight doors. If I were making the ship, I would design it to still work while capsized.
electrical systems go offline
battery powered pingers, like what they got on aircraft.
All of this stuff would be very expensive, and wouldn’t work on a car, but would work on boatymcboatface.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:44AM
International Maritime Oranization COLREGs
Part B-Rule 5 "requires that "every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper look-out by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate in the prevailing circumstances and conditions so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and of the risk of collision."
http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/safety/navigation/pages/preventing-collisions.aspx [imo.org]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:50AM
Read the summary:
employing them on-shore to monitor and operate robotic vessels remotely
The crew is on shore and the look-out on the ship is a cameraphone.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 05 2016, @07:32AM
Yeah, and the network never has any outages …
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 05 2016, @03:35AM
Radar is better than a mate in the crow's nest.
I'm surprised nobody is making a big deal about the lack of crew quarters, supplies, living space, wheel house, etc. On larger ships it's a smaller percentage of the total vessel, but for a smallish supply ship ditching the crew is a significant upgrade in carrying capacity.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday November 05 2016, @05:22AM
Radar is only good for large ships, or ships with radar enhancers.
Many, many smaller sailing ships get run over (and often sunk) by larger ships that "just didn't see" the smaller boat.
Camera operated ships will just be worse.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:20PM
Smaller sailing ships in the oil fields of the North sea (where these auto-supply craft are proposed to operate) can probably be convinced to put a reflector on the top of their mast. The mates in the crows' nests of the conventional ships won't be seeing them anyway.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by drussell on Saturday November 05 2016, @02:17AM
It will never get hijacked.... ?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 05 2016, @07:34AM
Well, for the pirates it has the advantage that they don't have to get on board and fight with people to hijack it. Just compromise the computer systems and take over control.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ilPapa on Saturday November 05 2016, @03:30AM
Wake me up when you've built the first onshore automated ship.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by GDX on Saturday November 05 2016, @03:31AM
That is unfeasible unless the automatic ones are the small delivery craft doing the transport from the main ship to the final offshore destination. After all, modern cargo ship are near autonomous, run with a few people and most of of the crew are for maintenance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @01:40PM
even though most of the positions would be different, right? i mean will you really need a deck hand on shore, for instance? Will the deck hand be qualified to wield the robo ship? i doubt it. sounds like unnecessary PR BS. why not just be realistic and say stuff like "losers will have more free time to learn an up to date skill"? lmao...
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday November 05 2016, @06:02PM