Rolls Royce Developing Drone Cargo Ships 216
kc123 writes in with news that Rolls Royce is designing unmanned cargo ships."Rolls-Royce's Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway, that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel's bridge. Eventually, the London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless ships. Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says."
until someone hacks it (Score:3)
And drives it into a pier with many people.
Re:until someone hacks it (Score:5, Insightful)
Will the pirates at least wave and say thank you to the crew when they take manual control of the ship? How about just looting a few cargo containers as it's travelling along?
Re:until someone hacks it (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet, the outcome is still better than it is now, where they hijack the ship and hold the crew ransom. Here, they hijack the ship, and.. that's it. There's no crew to hold for ransom, no one to talk to for instant quick payment, etc. You save human lives.
The only way to make money is for the pirates to go and sell the contents of the containers, which requires a lot more time, effort and money and takes a lot of time. Holding a crew hostage could easily get $10M+ in a week. Making money selling what's in the containers takes far longer.
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And no control over the contents that specific ship may have, or whether they can find a market for the booty...I don't buy it either.
I was under the impression that the whole point of the piracy was the payoff on the hostages, and really had nothing to do with the ship's cargo. (generalization, not 100% accurate)
Re:until someone hacks it (Score:4, Interesting)
And no control over the contents that specific ship may have, or whether they can find a market for the booty...I don't buy it either.
I was under the impression that the whole point of the piracy was the payoff on the hostages, and really had nothing to do with the ship's cargo. (generalization, not 100% accurate)
And no control over the ship either. The remote crew could just sail it to the nearest friendly warship.
Re:until someone hacks it (Score:5, Insightful)
And no control over the contents that specific ship may have, or whether they can find a market for the booty...I don't buy it either.
I was under the impression that the whole point of the piracy was the payoff on the hostages, and really had nothing to do with the ship's cargo. (generalization, not 100% accurate)
And no control over the ship either. The remote crew could just sail it to the nearest friendly warship.
Also no need for the ship to look like a regular ship to start with. No need for fixed railings or entrance ways at sea-level - good luck grappling to that.
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"The only way to make money is for the pirates to go and sell the contents of the containers"
Yeah... just like the only way for somebody stealing a famous work of art to make money is selling it.
Did you think about insurance companies willing to pay 10 millions for a cargo valued 150?
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why bother when you can pay 5 million to goons who go and whack the pirates back into the sea(since they have no hostages...).
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"$10M or your $LARGESUM ship and cargo land at the bottom of the ocean".
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"$10M or your $LARGESUM ship and cargo land at the bottom of the ocean".
Riiight. Because there's no possible way they could do that at the moment is there...?
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/20... [dilbert.com]
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"$10M or your $LARGESUM ship and cargo land at the bottom of the ocean".
They have the option to do that with a manned ship as well. Not seeing the value of your comment. Because instead of $200M it'll be a $250M ship?
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No hostages is really a game changer there. I mean you can just pipe in narcotic gas from containers already onboard. Best case, the pirates wake up in prison. Worst case, not at all.
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When there are no crew members you can send in troops to kill all the pirates...
With no crew members you can place sentry guns everywhere, no need to send in troops.
man, you didn't think that one through... (Score:2)
Then in the Winter, the guerrillas simply freeze to death.
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The only way to make money is for the pirates to go and sell the contents of the containers, which requires a lot more time, effort and money and takes a lot of time. Holding a crew hostage could easily get $10M+ in a week. Making money selling what's in the containers takes far longer.
Further, if the pirates regularly get into the retail business, they'll be motivated to prevent other pirates from interfering with their business, and eventually they'll become responsible businessmen. Meanwhile the shipper gets to write off their losses.
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Does it? Allot of organized crime already has one or several buyers for whatever is stolen. And the buyer(s) are usually the ones who gave the information of what where and when it can be stolen.
You think they're going to start unloading containers from a moving ship?
Let me guess: Into their little speedboats, right? And before the navy arrives.
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/20... [dilbert.com]
Re:until someone hacks it (Score:5, Interesting)
The ultimate failsafe if remote control was impossible and communication was disabled would be to trip a few circuits deep in the ship, jam the rudder and drop anchors. Good luck towing that. Basically it could be made really unpleasant and futile to hijack these ships. But it could make for some amusing news headlines.
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Will the pirates at least wave and say thank you to the crew when they take manual control of the ship?
What if there's no "manual control" when the ship is out at sea? Are they going to start unloading containers onto their little speedboat from a moving ship?
I'm going to start including this on all ./ replies: http://www.dilbert.com/fast/20... [dilbert.com]
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Putting in a centralized system creates a vulnerability to a single attack or bug.
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Hmmm, let's see. Several tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of floating kit, carrying possibly just as much value in cargo, int he middle of nowhere, with no-one in sight, just a video camera. Hmmm.
Will the pirates at least wave and say thank you to the crew when they take manual control of the ship? How about just looting a few cargo containers as it's travelling along?
Not quite. Currently piracy only occurs in a few areas of the world, all of which are quite heavily patrolled by various international naval task forces.
In those areas you might be able to board one of these ships and take control of it, but you can be pretty sure that there will be an armed boarding party from one of those naval warships en route pretty quickly. Currently you can threaten to kill the crew if they do not back off but with that threat gone you are going to have a hard time getting that ship
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Why not automatically releasing cages containing polar bears, killer bees, and tawny crazy ants to mess with the pirates electronics! (Sorry, too much coding and my brain is a little loopy today)
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It's not like a company with a bulls eye for the logo wouldn't possibly be chosen for malware to pull tonnes of credit card data. Didn't see that one coming either, but it happens.
They probably have some concepts, but generally R&D loves to sell an idea so much that they sometimes forget about the immediate consequences because the benefits are so damned cool.
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Unless the ship was remotely controllable....
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Support pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge, have several of them collide at the entrance to the Long Beach shipping terminal, blocking access for a few weeks, run over the deep water loading ports for crude oil. Run over a deep water drilling rig. I can think of any number of terrorist activities one could do. And remember, time and time again, no one really thinks of security until that "oh s___, we've been hacked" moment.
Except they could already do that with a manned vessel if it was at all feasible.
Worst. Idea. Ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hence, the idea is to equip those ships with infallible (*) engines.
(*) If the engine does fail, another drone ship will come and replace the whole engine automatically.
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Er yeah, well maybe. I used to do a fair bit of cruising. I admit the idea of an unmanned cargo ship barrelling down on my unsuspecting sailing boat is a bit scary. But on the other hand, do they ever keep watch in the open ocean anyway? ... I confess I doubt it. Might be an improvement.
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Er yeah, well maybe. I used to do a fair bit of cruising. I admit the idea of an unmanned cargo ship barrelling down on my unsuspecting sailing boat is a bit scary.
In this future, Gilligan and Tom Hanks will never be rescued.
worse hazard than submerged cargo containers (Score:2)
And how does it save fuel? (Score:2)
Presumably a ship like this would have a much smaller (but non-zero) amount of structure dedicated to crew facilities, which would make it lighter, but that extra space would probably get filled with containers, basically nullifying that savings.
I don't know what percentage of the fuel burn is dedicated to ship electrical generation, but this seems trivial relative to the amount of fuel used to move it through the water.
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You didn't RTFA, did you? They are saying that the technology to have crewless ships exists but isn't economically viable yet, and besides which regulations require minimum crew levels. Much like driverless cars.
It's at the concept state and they are clearly aware of the issues.
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The Brotherhood of Pirates' Worldwide doesn't officially have a problem with the idea.
I'm sure pirates will like them. (Score:2)
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Modern pirates make most of their money by kidnapping and ransoming crews. If there is no crew, there is far less incentive to board the ship.
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in containers that aren't labelled, stacked 5 high and 10 wide [or more], where you would have to move most containers to be able to actually open them to see inside, nevermind the whole "in the middle of the ocean without a road in sight" thing.
and while it could be fairly easy to disable remote control of the ship [by physically destroying/disconnecting the antenae/satellite dish], and they can kill the engine, it may not be that easy to get control of the ship to get it to shore in a reasonable [for the
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You mean, "give us money or we'll sink it, and drown in the process - or the very least, get caught."
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In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
On the other hand, you aren't going to get much of a ransom for a satellite modem and a half-rack of control gear, no matter how menacing and willing to kill the hostages you look... Also, even crewed vessels of any significant size are usually wearing a beacon of some type, and if the cops are days away, so to is the nearest possible buyer for the cargo.
(Probably more relevant, with the exception of, quite atypical, security contractors brought on out of necessity for very, very, bad neighborhoods, it i
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And you forget about the ever-present dockworkers unions, that note what goes in each container, and where it is located... this might make things much easier for the mafias.
That said, the biggest offense is that our wealthy and powerful are continually trying to find ways to eliminate -- and put to death -- the very people who have supported them.
In other words, they are traitors.
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For non-fluid and non-containerized cargo, the fact that you can get nimble humans for peanuts, while similarly agile robots are either ruinously expensive or simply not for sale, is li
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but for containerized cargo, I'd imagine that weighing and load-balance computation are probably already partially computerized
Both are fully automated. The crane is still operated by a human but that's only because of unions, a robot could do it as well or better. The crane weighs the containers while transporting them. This is a relatively new development, so there might be some places where this ain't true. It's important, though, because the weight on the customs declaration is often a lie, with repercussions for balance as you imply.
Somebody come up with an effective automated tiedown mechanism
That's what they use now. A human is supposed to check the connection of containers on the top
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Insurance.
Pirates don't hit more then a fraction of container ships per year. So even if they tried to do this, it's not damage for the company - ship owners insure, cargo movers insure, and the insurer reliably knows that only something like 42 out of 30,000 ships are going to be hijacked/destroyed.
If the situation gets appreciably bad enough, then it's common enough that military operations will have an easy time killing pirates since they'd be easy to find and pirates are not well armed.
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I'm sure pirates will like them. In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
But will they like the pair of Hailfire Droids that went along for the ride?
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That's why these ships would be equipped with a self-destruct mechanism.
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In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
Please explain how that differs from the current situation, when many ships' crews are not permitted to carry armament in any case. You're complaining that the cops are days away but they're days away from a manned ship as well, and if you take one of those over you get hostages.
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pull out the control cards and let the ships go dead.
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There will allways be a manual override, on the fancy automated vessels that I check out (fully equiped with Dynamic Positioning systems or DP) there are automatic control systems (DP), simple backup joystick systems and finally simple manual systems (levers for thrusters). These would very likely remain. A pilot would need access to these when taking the vessel into harbour.
Even though it is possible to have vessels remote controlled while at sea they
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Scuttling a super-tanker is hardly trivial. Unless the pirates know what they're doing and have some high-end explosives, it's unlikely they'd even be able to breach the hull.
What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is mainly about using telepresence and computers to pilot a ship. But other than piloting, what else do humans do, and how automatable is it?
For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way? During a storm, do people ever have to run around fixing chains that are working loose, or fix a leaking seal and set up pumps to pump out a flooded compartment?
I don't know the answers to the above questions, by the way. I don't know much about cargo ships.
Even if we still need humans for some tasks on a cargo ship, perhaps not too far in the future, we might have telepresence robots that can do the tasks.
Re:What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score:5, Informative)
Generally the employees on a ship are divided into officers and crew. The officers include the captain, first mate, and second mate. Also the officers include the engineering department, with a chief engineer, second engineer, and third engineer. Among the crew, there are a bunch of seamen (perhaps 5 or more of them). There is also a steward and a cook.
All of these people are divided into shifts. At any given time, there are 5 or so people working: one deck officer (such as the captain), one engineer (who is maintaining the large engine), and a couple of able seaman, one of whom is on lookout at the front of the ship.
I doubt they could do away with the engineering positions. These ships have large engines which require continuous maintenance. It won't be done by robots any time soon.
Perhaps they could automate the captain/lookout positions. Doing so would reduce the people on a shift from 5 or so, to 3. Perhaps there could be one captain for a convoy of ships, and a single lookout for the forward-most ship in the convoy. Also they could reduce the steward/cook to one person (instead of two) per ship in that case.
Re:What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea is being proposed by an engine manufacture. I'm sure they thought about engine maintenance.
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Ask someone in the Navy about maintenance ... (Score:2)
For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way?
Find someone who served in the Navy and ask them how much time is spent scraping and painting, wiping and oiling. Funny how that never makes it into TV commercials, well except for the Saturday Night Live spoof of a Navy commercial in the 70s.
Re:What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score:4, Informative)
very few airplanes need in-air service.
I remember reading about a plane where there was a crawspace so you could do maintenance on engines while in flight. But I'll point out that cargo ships are often out of dock for 30+ days at a time, while planes are hardly ever up for more than half a day, after which they go through large amounts of maintenance.
Re:What do the humans actually do on a ship? (Score:5, Funny)
I remember reading about a plane where there was a crawspace so you could do maintenance
No, that's where they put the snakes.
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I remember reading about a plane where there was a crawspace so you could do maintenance on engines while in flight.
The B-36 bomber and one or two others.
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Oh, yeah, you COULD do it.
If you overengineered the ships (making them 5 times more expensive) AND had complete checks agter every 1000 operation hours of everything (which is basically every round-trip for a container ship).
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Airplanes do not normally float in a medium of highly corrosive saltwater. And they can usually go _around_ storms, or land when the weather gets excessively dangerous. And even good quality, powerful engines need regular hand-on maintenance over the course of a 30 day trip.
Arrrg, heirrrr I come, mateys! (Score:2)
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Will this herald the rise of intercontinental hobos?
Now that might be a really entertaining way to spend my retirement. Thanks for the suggestion. :)
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It already exists, it's called American college kids, hipstering their way down the years from Berlin->Prague->Barcelona->Costa Rica->Beijing. You just have to know where the current cool place is.
Mod parent up - intercontinental hobos ahoy (Score:2)
Sorry, I'm commenting to remove a bad mod (I'm sure I didn't click Redundant).
I love the idea of intercontinental hobos though. Containership Willy, riding the currents. Would their bindles be low power outboards?
Laws would have to be changed (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone boards an unmanned drone ship, wouldn't they be able to claim the ship as salvage and sell the contents?
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Absolutely!
Also, international law requires that every ship continuously maintains a "proper" watch by all possible means while at underway. Further, all ships are required to render assistance to any ship or crew in distress. An unmanned ship would by its very nature be unable to maintain a watch 24/7 or pull an injured crew from a liferaft.
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If someone boards an unmanned drone ship, wouldn't they be able to claim the ship as salvage and sell the contents?
Presumably they would have to get past whatever automated or semi-automated defenses the ship would have.
Very little benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
Drone ships would have very little benefit compared to ships of today, and would save very little labor. That's because crew sizes are already negligible on modern ships. Ships require very little labor for their operation. For example, a massive containership like the Maersk Triple-E might carry 15,000 containers (equivalent to about 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads) while having a crew of 15, in three shifts. At any one time, there are 5 people transporting 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads of cargo. If we reduced those jobs, it would make very little difference to costs or anything else.
Bear in mind that three of the 15 positions are the engineering staff who are frequently performing physical operations on a massive engine. Those jobs will not go away by having a single captain for multiple ships.
The number of jobs on a ship is decreasing every year anyway, as ships gradually grow larger. Larger ships generally do not have larger crews, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo keeps dropping anyway. Large containerships today carry more than twice the cargo of ships from 20 years ago, while crew sizes have not grown, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo has dropped by half and continues dropping.
Labor costs are already an extremely small fraction of the costs of operating a ship. It would make little difference to reduce labor costs further.
Re:Very little benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
I should also point out that the statistics mentioned in the article are incorrect. From the article:
A modern containership can cost $200 million, and can consume 300 tons of bunker fuel per day. Thus, the fuel costs are over $100,000 per day, and the costs of the purchase of the ship are over $50,000 per day.
Thus, crew costs are more like 2% of all costs, and not 44% as the quotation indicates.
The only way to arrive at the 44% figure is if you break down containership costs into capital costs (the cost of the ship), bunker costs (fuel), and operating costs (not including fuel). This kind of breakdown is commonly done. If you break things down in this way, "operating costs" are generally about 10% of the total cost of running the ship, and labor costs would be 44% of that ~10%. Thus, labor costs altogether are a few percent of the cost of running a ship.
The article does not spell this out, and gives a mistaken impression.
Why? (Score:3)
I don't see a big win here. It doesn't save that much labor. If it allowed using more small ships instead of giant ones, it might be worth something, but the economies of scale for post-Panamax container ships aren't really related to crew size.
Still, automated operations at ports have come a long way. Several big ports use big automated guided vehicles for container movement, and many container cranes are now fully automated. See this video [youtube.com] for a modern port operation.
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According to TFA it allows 5% more cargo capacity and 12 - 15% less fuel because there is no bridge or living quarters, no food stores, no toilets, no air conditioning.
Comments from shipping experts? (Score:3)
The Rolls-Royce calculations show that there is a measurable saving in pollution by leaving off most of the crew support features. Fine - a potential saving exists. Now let's explore whether the saving is practical
Large ships do not turn suddenly - it can take miles and tens of minutes to turn a large tanker. You do not have to provide the captain with a real-time 360-degree virtual environment. You have to provide some sort of autonomous fail-safe in case communications are lost. You can have a one-time pad encryption for sending instructions, so remote hacking without a copy of the pad should be difficult if not impossible.
What if the ship gets into difficulties? We know the problems that conventional ships get into. It should be possible to calculate what fraction of these could be fixed by the crew at see, and factored into the potential saving. This is what the analysis should do. If you are in a storm, and a conventional container ship starts spilling its load, there is probably not much the crew can do other than hang on and wait for the storm to pass. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a small number of faults at sea could be fixed by flying out personnel to the ship and landing on the flat top of the containers, if nowhere else. So, you factor in the costs of a call-out.
Might work. Won't ever work if no-one's prepared to think about it, though.
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So here's something this makes me wonder about: without the necessity of crew life support, why not turn them into shallow cruising submarines?
Not deep water at all - no more then 10 meters or so below the surface, but deep enough that they can cruise under the waves and weather, towing some breathing gear to feed the engines from the top.
You'd have no risk of crew life support failure or drowning, since they're not on board. It'd be impossible for pirates to get to. It would be completely safe around other
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So here's something this makes me wonder about: without the necessity of crew life support, why not turn them into shallow cruising submarines?
It's nontrivial to create a sub into which you can conveniently load containers.
Excellent! (Score:2)
Even more jobs taken from people and given to robots! Maybe soon robots will be in charge of giving jobs to robots. What could go wrong?
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Even more jobs taken from people and given to robots! Maybe soon robots will be in charge of giving jobs to robots. What could go wrong?
We could fail to decouple living expenses from work, for one. That would be stupid and fucking ridiculous, but it could happen. We could just put our hands over our ears and shout LALALA and ignore progress and pretend that people who do more work that we personally approve of are more deserving of life, forever. Then we would wind up with a cultural wasteland full of abused, depressed people.
Hmm, kind of like now
So what you're saying is ... (Score:3)
Might be useful for cargo ship convoys (Score:2)
The first use of this might be for cargo ship convoys, instead of letting drones loose by themselves. I'm thinking that one or more new drone ships would tag along with a regular manned cargo ship, effectively increasing the capacity of the crew of the manned ship. The crew would be nearby for maintenance and emergencies. Remember that as with any new technology it would be phased in- the thousands of current cargo ships are not going to disappear overnight. If this technology is ever implemented, there
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One image per 5 minutes is probably more than enough for virtually all ships, since they move so slowly, and since there's no point in breaking for something you detect faster than that. Once something interesting shows up, you increase the update frequency to 1 image per minute, and so on until you reach real-time streaming. Also, since most of the sea isn't changing, you can also filter out almost all of the picture when the update is sent.
You could even trigger the change in update frequency with sensors
Re:Bandwidth (Score:4, Funny)
It's awesome to know that nothing will ever go wrong in five minutes.
Altho, it's amazing that all captains who had at least five minutes to respond to everything ever lost a ship.
It's going to be awesome to have the best new captains who can respond to everything with five minute breaks during their shift! Thank you for your insight! You are exactly what I expect from anon cowards! I bow to your creativity!
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since most of the sea isn't changing,
You must be stranger to these parts.
Welcome, Strange Alien, and what planet do you hail from? Here on Earth, what any human can see from the deck of any boat on any ocean at almost any time is the most constantly changing visual in human experience. Never is any part of that surface not in motion.
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In the article they say that drone ships will eventually be commanded by captains on the land.
However, the article includes a CGI picture of a convoy of containerships. I'm guessing the idea might be to have a convoy of drone ships, where a single captain controls 6 different ships in a convoy. Maybe that would be the first iteration, with land-based control coming later.
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Anyone who has used a satellite uplink for the web can tell you that the bandwidth is oversold, and if you even try to stream video you get nailed by the FUP (fair use policy).
That is what you get for buying cheap "broadband" services. Major TV networks have been doing outside broadcast over satellite uplinks for years.
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And can ignore pesky mayday calls(at best relay) unless they have automatic human assistance, rations, medical stuff on board. It's handy having humans out there in emergencies imo.
I suspect that no shipping company spokesperson, or cargo ship supplier, would get within a mile of a live mic while saying so; but do you think they'd shed too many tears if tragically certain sorts of (expensive, delay-inducing, largely unrewarding) rescue missions were simply no longer within their capabilities?
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I would think no crew would make life harder for the pirates. Currently they can take the crew hostage which means they can force (at gunpoint) the crew to tell them how to operate the ship, and it also means that attempting to recover the ship by force puts the crews life at risk.
With a crewless ship I'd it would be much harder for the pirates to take control of the ship and much easier for a recovery team to take it back off them without getting any "good guys" killed.
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The pirates would also have no way of controlling the ship. They'd just be along for the ride while the coastguard waits for them to sail past.
All they could do is disable it. With no way to easily take any cargo either.
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I think you left out a word---the Somali's what? And to which Somali do you refer? (Last I heard there were quite a few of them.)
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Just because occupations have popped up to replace these lost jobs in the past doesn't mean that they will in the future.
As machines become more and more capable, they can accomplish more and more of the things that previously only people could do, and will presumably tend towards being able to do anything a human could do. As we get closer to that point, it's quite possible there will be increasingly large sections of the population who find themselves effectively unemployable as there's very little they c
Re: and what about the welfare for the people auto (Score:5, Interesting)
You really hate washing machines and tractors too? How much human work is lost because of machines?
Some ... for now. What happens when all of the ~4,000,000 truck drivers in the US are out of a job due to automation. Oh, they'll go to work fixing robots.Mmm hmm. As someone who has been doing controls systems engineering for the last 10 years, I can tell you that these systems are getting better all of the time. I used to get calls at night and on weekends a lot. Now, very few calls. The hardware and software tools and upgrades make it so that the system is very robust. Now, very few calls.
And those truck drivers? Well, I can tell you that the electrical technician's (we have about the same amount as we did 10 years ago) workload has also decreased. Motor brushes are going away. Bearings are becoming sealed, or automated grease systems installed. Breakers: now know when they are able to trip the load, they can isolate the load to the least affected area, and they can minimize the damage because they are so fast. Things last longer because of materials engineering and computer modelling. These guys just don't have that much to do anymore (Kaizen boards, and PRTs notwithstanding, that shit is just make-work).
And really, have you met many truck drivers? Some are very intelligent, but the vast majority have a boring mindless job for a reason.
Take automated cars for instance: Taxicab drivers out of a job. But not only that. Maybe I and my neighbors sign up for a service where a self driving car is called up and arrives where you are in a matter of minutes. I'm not going to buy another car, that's just a waste of money. Also, less cars on the road because they are operating all of the time. Think about how much time your car just sits there. (There's a job at Ford that I've contemplated applying for, but this gives me pause.) And then, less accidents. Bye bye insurance middleman. Bye bye auto body repair guy.Oh yeah, don't forget to apply for a job fixing robots. Bye bye garages. I'm sure our houses will just become bigger.
I could keep typing along these lines, but maybe you could put your mind to this line of reasoning and come up with many more examples. Seriously, the near term future is vastly different than what we've been experiencing. But in the long term, that's a good thing. And the long term future is radically different.
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So we need less reliable hardware so that plenty of people have jobs...? We need to kill off the trains so that truck drivers keep their jobs? ;-)
It wasn't so long ago that the computer (word processor) put hundreds of typists out of work. Email put hundreds of post-room workers out of a job. Yet still, we don't have vast settlements of out of work typists and posties.
I don't know what the future holds, or how we'll deal with it. What I can tell you is that during the Industrial Revolution here in the UK, t