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Ship porn

How about these :eek:
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I worked a conference recently about the economics, legal issues and development of semi-autonomous/autonomous shipping. This one is fairly sedate/conventional but there are a whole lot of absolutely bonkers designs out there for consideration. Some at least will actually be launched in trial form over the next few years.

Various legal/jurisdictional issues have still to be hammered-out because of the nature of unmanned operation but the money side of things is definitely right for them now.
 
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I worked a conference recently about the economics, legal issues and development of semi-autonomous/autonomous shipping. This one is fairly sedate/conventional but there are a whole lot of absolutely bonkers designs out there for consideration. Some at least will actually be launched in trial form over the next few years.

Various legal/jurisdictional issues have still to be hammered-out because of the nature of unmanned operation but the money side of things is definitely right for them now.
Those CAPTCHA images of traffic lights are helping autonomous cars make sense of visual images by having humans interrogate the images of complex street scenes. So far, I have not been challenged by images where I have to look at a view of small wooden fishing boats with lines of buoys where I have to figure out if they are lobster pots, or a drift net that will tangle round the propeller and disable the ship.
Those same wooden fishing boats suddenly disappear from the radar where the weather picks up and wave scatter hides them. Interpreting intermittent radar targets is a skill I can't imaging will be easy for a machine to learn.
If I am entering a foreign port as captain and I kill some guys in an invisible fishing boat, who goes to jail? Who goes to jail if the ship is autonomous?
Who will do all the chipping and painting and maintenance of the ships? Will they be taken out of service for that, like a plane?
How are you going to hand over the mooring lines? Put a crew on by helicopter to handle the lines? Has anyone looked at helo fatality statistics?

Dodging ships with an AIS ought to be fairly straight forward, but that's the easy stuff. Lots of coastal states will not be happy with autonomous ships killing fishers...and will, presumably, have to get their airforce to bomb the ship to stop it.

I'm sceptical. For the navy, clearly there may be applications, as has been shown in the Black Sea, but for cargo and passenger transport? Even for easy applications, like the Woolwich Ferry...all's will until it runs over a kayaker.
 
Those CAPTCHA images of traffic lights are helping autonomous cars make sense of visual images by having humans interrogate the images of complex street scenes. So far, I have not been challenged by images where I have to look at a view of small wooden fishing boats with lines of buoys where I have to figure out if they are lobster pots, or a drift net that will tangle round the propeller and disable the ship.
Those same wooden fishing boats suddenly disappear from the radar where the weather picks up and wave scatter hides them. Interpreting intermittent radar targets is a skill I can't imaging will be easy for a machine to learn.
If I am entering a foreign port as captain and I kill some guys in an invisible fishing boat, who goes to jail? Who goes to jail if the ship is autonomous?
Who will do all the chipping and painting and maintenance of the ships? Will they be taken out of service for that, like a plane?
How are you going to hand over the mooring lines? Put a crew on by helicopter to handle the lines? Has anyone looked at helo fatality statistics?

Dodging ships with an AIS ought to be fairly straight forward, but that's the easy stuff. Lots of coastal states will not be happy with autonomous ships killing fishers...and will, presumably, have to get their airforce to bomb the ship to stop it.

I'm sceptical. For the navy, clearly there may be applications, as has been shown in the Black Sea, but for cargo and passenger transport? Even for easy applications, like the Woolwich Ferry...all's will until it runs over a kayaker.


Seems they will still have bodies on board, but far fewer than normal. The bridge duties are those being outsourced, the expensive bits.

Would have thought that airliners would be much easier to lead this charge, but passengers totally wouldn't accept that right now, a number of years of cargo flights operating might change that though.
 
Seems they will still have bodies on board, but far fewer than normal. The bridge duties are those being outsourced, the expensive bits.

Would have thought that airliners would be much easier to lead this charge, but passengers totally wouldn't accept that right now, a number of years of cargo flights operating might change that though.
…I though cargo operators bought used 737s?…ie cheap planes, not ones that will cost 50% more than regular ones to be able to fly themselves. CAPEX tends to drive investment decisions.

The marine environment is brutal. All those ABs are out chipping and painting all day when at sea. Most operators won’t take ships out of service every couple of months for maintenance.

Also, despite Starlink, getting reliable and affordable internet communications is beyond the ability of most ships I’ve been on.

Watchkeeping is actually quite skilled work. You have ARPA collision avoidance on the radars, and that picks up vessels that are big and made of steel. AIS data also appears on the screen. That’s the easy stuff, just like aero radar only picks up stuff with a radio beacon. An A380 won’t detect a little home-built project plane. Fortunately, they tend to be at different altitudes. Ships all operate at the same altitude. I just don’t see how interrogating visual data, which is what self-driving care rely on heavily, will work on ships trying to differentiate between a lobster pot and a drift net float.
 
As for having shore-based assistance…

The US Navy has problems with “situational awareness” when navigating and they hit large, slow moving, cargo ships. Part of the problem is the helmsman not having a window to look out of. I am not convinced that remote operators will be better than the current seafarers, and the training will probably be even worse than the grey funnel line

 
Exactly, flying is much more standard , whilst the unexpected can always happen it’s not as variable as the oceans.

Cargo operators use 767, 777 and 747s mainly, as well as a host of other odd things, often very old, cos the passengers never complain about these things.
 
They work too, of course you can still see them but the idea is that getting a range on them via periscope would be hard, which it was, also hard to tell if they are heading towards or away from you. Can't remember the exact figures, but dazzle had something like ~15% more chance of survival than non-dazzle.
 
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