CREWLESS AND REMOTE CONTROLLED SHIPS BY ROLLS-ROYCE TO PLY OUR SEAS

Rolls-Royce is not just limiting its potentials to the manufacturing of luxurious cars, as it gets ready to shape the future of shipping with its fleet of crewless, but remote control autonomous ship by 2020.

Speaking at an Autonomous Ship Symposium in Amsterdam, Rolls-Royce Vice President of Marine Innovation, Oskar Levander said the technology is in place ‘This is happening. It is not if, it is when. The technology needed to make remote and autonomous ship a reality exists. We will see a remote controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade’

Levander said testing is underway in Finland and the group has already created a simulated autonomous ship control system. The 6.6 million euro ($7.3 million) project is due to run until 2017 and has drawn on smartphones, aviation drones and driverless cars to help develop unmanned ships.
Highlighted advantages of an autonomous ship include the weight, space and cost saving of removing accommodation quarters. It’s suggested the extra space created would be given up to allow increase cargo load.

The white paper, titled ‘Remote & Autonomous Ships – the next step’, says the next step is to focus on safety, maritime insurance compliance and technology development in order to achieve ‘rapid commercialization’.
The paper describes how a ship could be guided out of a busy port area by an on-shore operator in a control room using a joystick.
On-board sensors would inform the controller of any potential risks or obstacles.
In open sea conditions Rolls-Royce suggests the ship could run on fully autonomous settings, guided only by satellite connection and on-board sensors. The crewless ships would also be cheaper to build and maintain, ROLLS-ROYCE says.