First Electric Autonomous Cargo Ship Launched In Norway (techxplore.com) 72
Zero emissions and, soon, zero crew: the world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, a small but promising step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint. TechXplore reports: By shipping up to 120 containers of fertilizer from a plant in the southeastern town of Porsgrunn to the Brevik port a dozen kilometres (about eight miles) away, the much-delayed Yara Birkeland, shown off to the media on Friday, will eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fueled by polluting diesel. The 80-meter, 3,200-deadweight tonne ship will soon begin two years of working trials during which it will be fine-tuned to learn to maneuver on its own.
The wheelhouse could disappear altogether in "three, four or five years", said Holsether, once the vessel makes its 7.5-nautical-mile trips on its own with the aid of sensors. "Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error, because of fatigue for instance," project manager Jostein Braaten said from the possibly doomed bridge. "Autonomous operating can enable a safe journey," he said.
On board the Yara Birkeland, the traditional machine room has been replaced by eight battery compartments, giving the vessel a capacity of 6.8 MWh -- sourced from renewable hydroelectricity. "That's the equivalent of 100 Teslas," says Braaten. The maritime sector, which is responsible for almost three percent of all man-made emissions, aims to reduce its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. Despite that, the sector has seen a rise in recent years.
The wheelhouse could disappear altogether in "three, four or five years", said Holsether, once the vessel makes its 7.5-nautical-mile trips on its own with the aid of sensors. "Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error, because of fatigue for instance," project manager Jostein Braaten said from the possibly doomed bridge. "Autonomous operating can enable a safe journey," he said.
On board the Yara Birkeland, the traditional machine room has been replaced by eight battery compartments, giving the vessel a capacity of 6.8 MWh -- sourced from renewable hydroelectricity. "That's the equivalent of 100 Teslas," says Braaten. The maritime sector, which is responsible for almost three percent of all man-made emissions, aims to reduce its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. Despite that, the sector has seen a rise in recent years.
what shall we do...? (Score:3)
"Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error, because of alcohol for instance," Ftfy. There's also the time the Filipino crew ran aground due to the crew being busy watching a Pacquio fight.
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It's in coastal waters and therefore several rules about who is in command don't apply.
Charging time is obviously not important in this application. A hybrid, diesel- electric sized for cruise and batteries for maneuvering at both ends might make sense in a lot of cases.
Re: what shall we do...? (Score:1)
A hybrid, diesel- electric...
Right, because regenerative braking is so very effective at sea.
Re: what shall we do...? (Score:4, Funny)
Lithobraking sure is more effective, but generally frowned upon. Mostly because ships in general are hardly equipped for it.
Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about all the money that can be saved by not having to pay all those humans to sit off the coast of California for 6 months.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The Port of Los Angeles got some press for becoming more automated a few years ago but I don't think it's at this level.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3)
So... if this autonomous vehicle runs over a small sailboat killing everybody on board because the AI isn't any smarter than a tesla [kqed.org] then it's the fault of the boaters because they should have known that some freighters are robots than are allowed run over them at any time because they can't help it and this is about saving salaries.
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"will eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fuelled by polluting diesel" - the environment benefits greatly and reduces the chances of road accidents.
"as having no crew " - the crew will more than likely be remote instead of onboard.
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Compared to 40,000 truck trips a year?
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
This thing is going to carry 120 cargo containers with a total weight of over 3200 thousand tons. That's over *three million kilograms*. It's not like it can stop on a dime or swerve around obstacles.
That's why there's something in maritime law called the "Law of Gross Tonnage", which is pretty much common sense: a substantially heavier vessel has right of way even if the the rules for vessels of roughly equal size would favor the other vesel.
If you're sailing your 15 foot racing dinghy across the path of a container ship, you can't expect the thing to *stop* or try to *dodge* you because "power gives way to sail" or you're the vessel on the starboard side.
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A skilled master can do all kinds of things to avoid a collision with a small craft, starting with the radio and the ship's horn. You don't get out on the water, do you.
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They can and should sound the ship's horn. They can and should slow down. Doing otherwise is a dereliction of duty with possible legal and other repercussions.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
For your edification, right of way does not relieve the stand-on vessel of the obligation to avoid collision. When, from any cause, the vessel required to keep her course and speed finds herself so close that collision cannot be avoided by the action of the give-way vessel alone, she shall take such action as will best aid to avoid collision. [wikisource.org]
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Also, to your (incorrect) point about tonnage, a vessel constrained by her draught shall navigate with particular caution having full regard to her special condition. [wikisource.org]
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Sure, legally you're obliged do what you can, but in the case of a sailboat that cuts across your path when you're carrying thousands of tons of containers that's pretty close to nothing.
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You're a master of a ship and you run over a sailboat for any reason, you will be very lucky if that is not the end of your career. By the way, "law of tonnage" is not a law. COLREGS are the law.
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COLREGS are not the be-all-end-all. There are other regulations that equal or supersede COLREGS, for example in VTS/TSS, MPZ's(which are definitely not covered in COLREGS). Oh, and there are plenty of cases where a sailboat has been run over by a large ship, and held fully responsible. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] The captain of Hanne Knutsen was cleared, while the skipper of the sailing yacht was fined and made to pay costs https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en... [bbc.com]
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In your example the ship's master adhered to COLREGS with a horn warning and evidently slowing down, if my eyes don't deceive me. COLREGS are in fact the internationally accepted law of the sea, or as you put it, the be-all-end-all. Not sure what your point is or if you have one. If that ship's master had gone through those yacht's at full speed and had not taken those actions to attempt to avert the impending collision then he would no doubt have been relieved of his job, at the least.
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Lt Wilson contravened three Colregs: [sail-world.com]
Rule 5; He did not keep an adequate lookout.
Rule 9b; He impeded a large vessel in a narrow channel.
Rule 18; He impeded a vessel constrained by its draft.
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Well I'm sure that will be of great comfort to the relatives and friends of the dead sailors on board the sailing boat.
Even if you have right of way. if you could have done something to avoid a collision but you didn't, it's poor seamanship. Right of way is irrelevant if you've drowned.
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if you could have done something to avoid a collision but you didn't, it's poor seamanship
Exactly my point. The obligation to make best efforts to avoid collision applies to both the stand-on and the give-way vessel, legally, morally and practically.
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And why would an automatic ship run over a boat?
Seriously? You have thunking problems?
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Because it can't actually see or think. Much like you actually.
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Because you need human eyeballs to spot a sailing boat. They do not show up on radar most of the time. Also, most of them don't have AIS.
Many sailboats have radar reflectors in their rigging but they are way to small to make a practical difference. So, they are invisible to robots.
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Radar reflectors work quite well.
I would assume in this case, that the ship is going along a "sea water way" - so it has right of way anyway.
And on top of that: it is likely monitoring the way with video, so a sailing boat is easy to spot. Most likely it is half remote controlled, as in having an operator in one of the harbours. And on top of that will only go in perfect weather conditions.
No idea if pleasure boats in Norway are required to have AIS. In Thailand they are. (In Germany they are not requred, a
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In practice, the small boats have always had to be the ones to get out of the way of the large freighters. There's no point in sitting in a sailing boat in the path of a large ship bleating about how sail has priority. The large ship probably can't stop or turn in time to not run you down.
The thing that does concern me is this argument:
Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error
This is meaningless unless you can show that the incidents that do happen because of human error outweigh the incidents that don't happen because a human was there to interve
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Obey collregs or end up in deep shit.
Or... (Score:2)
They could just build a conveyor belt. Incredibly efficient and a helluva lot faster.
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Use old-school delivery tubes powered by air pressure.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Informative)
The way to keep it dry and prevent the wind from blowing it away is to put a little roof over it.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-worlds-longest-conveyor-belt-system-bou-craa-morocco
It's eight times longer than the distance that ship has to travel.
Air tubes are more for speed than efficiency.
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Give my regards to Captain Dunsel (Score:2)
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I'm think what will happen when Somali pirates board this ship...
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Don't know that person. But all the pirates will be needing is an oversized can-opener in the future.
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They either freeze to death as they can not open the ship, or die due to a stomach revolution when they prey open a container and eat the fertilizer.
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Would-be autonomous == autonomous? (Score:1)
Wow, I don't realize that news reporting could be this sloppy.
The wheelhouse could disappear altogether in "three, four or five years", said Holsether, once the vessel makes its 7.5-nautical-mile trips on its own with the aid of sensors.
A ship that COULD, one day, hopefully, be autonomous, are already being reported as autonomous. Isn't this jumping the gun a bit too far? Should the headline be used when the ship actually started to run on its own?
By that logic, Tesla, Waymo, Uber, etc all have autonomous cars running around in America streets for years already, right?
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Most issues with self-driving cars are due to collisions and lane keeping, which are far less worrying in this scenario. Ships move a lot slower and are not restricted to a lane about the width of the vessel. Besides, this is a very short journey (less than 15 km), so there is much less than can go wrong.
Of course it can still run aground, run on some sailing boat or whatever, but it's still easier to handle than a single car in traffic.
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Such a boat would run along a set of fixed coordinates. No way it can run on ground.
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The ocean has tides and currents and shifting sands and there's also wind even if the other things aren't there. keeping to fixed coordinates is harder than it looks.
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Ships move slowly but they take a long time to change direction or stop. Also, the medium they are moving through is itself constantly moving and the wind can have a serious effect. Finally, the "lane" may also be pretty restrictive. When entering or leaving ports, the channel that is deep enough for the ship might only be a little bit wider than the ship itself.
Small-scale test (Score:2)
Reading through the article, it seems this is more a low-rish test for future developments than a solution for the current problem. If the ship goes off-line for weeks during testing, the transportation network it "replaces" doesn't fall apart.
It isn't like this solution knocks hours out of the transit time; Road transportation between the points mentioned seems to be about 20-30 minutes.
The port at Brevik is not the final destination; it's only where the loads are transferred to other ships. So this ship a
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Well, someone wanted to build, test and operate and automatic electric ship.
Sounds they found a perfect place doing such a thing.
But alas: the /. nitpickers think it is wasted money ... how surprising.
And zero crew lowers the climate footprint how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Zero emissions and, soon, zero crew: the world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, a small but promising step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint. TechXplore reports:
Seems like it just being fully electric meets the zero emissions step toward reducing the climate footprint, not sure why the autonomous / zero crew part is important for that, unless *another* goal is reduced employees.
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Seems like it just being fully electric meets the zero emissions step toward reducing the climate footprint, not sure why the autonomous / zero crew part is important for that, unless *another* goal is reduced employees.
This thing is essentially the equivalent of a floating horizontal elevator, operating on a fixed route of about eight miles on an inland waterway: Imagine a barge-style ferry on a cable being towed back-and-forth between two dedicated nearby loading/unloading slips. Then, since the two sli
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Thanks! Nice explanation although maybe have one crew person in case of the unexpected and/or emergency ...
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Nah. They'd just get in the way. And then you have to have crew quarters, HVAC, food, water, entertainment, etc.
If there is an issue put the vessel in a state where it maintains its position, then send out of a crew on a helicopter.
Nuclear fission is closer to ZEV than electric. (Score:1)
I'll believe the powers that be are taking CO2 emissions reduction seriously when they talk of nuclear fission powered cargo ships. The UK government is taking this seriously because they are making plans to build civil nuclear powered cargo ships. It looks like Australia, New Zealand, and Japan might be on board with this too. I recall an old German experiment, which was a about the time of experiments in the USA and Japan.
Electricity is not an energy source, it is a medium of storage and transport. the
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Electric ships are not making gains on lowering CO2 emissions. ...
You seem to miss the fact that this ship is operating in Norway
it is even in the headline ...
Those that don't want "nukes" don't want solutions.
FTFY: you are underestimating those "who do not want nukes" and are overestimating your "fake knowledge" about nukes.
Those that don't want "nukes" don't want THE PROBLEMS associated with nukes
And just to give you a small hint, how you would come over "way smarter" than you are: offer solutions to the
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And just to give you a small hint, how you would come over "way smarter" than you are: offer solutions to the problems of nukes.
Build them. We aren't going to develop nuclear power technology, therefore solving the problems, until we start building them and making improvements with each iteration. This is true of any technology, you have to build working full scale prototypes to even know where the problems are so you can fix them. If the problem is build time and build cost then the only way to bring that down is with real world experience, and that means building full scale operational prototypes.
If you want to look smart then
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Build them. We aren't going to develop nuclear power technology, therefore solving the problems, until we start building them
As you probably know: the main problem of nukes is waste
Building more, makes more waste.
So building nukes is not a solution to the waste problem.
Find a solution, farm in your Nobel Prize, and we build nukes again.
Simple ...
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We know how to build nuclear fission reactors that burn nuclear waste for fuel. The answer is still building more nuclear fission power plants because building more means less waste.
We will build more nuclear fission power plants because we are running out of excuses.
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We know how to build nuclear fission reactors that burn nuclear waste for fuel.
No, we don't. As nuclear "waste" can not be burned "for fuel".
Any more idiocies?
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Why the fuck replace hydro with nukes? The people who want to replace hydro with nukes have a one track mind.
This article does remind me to pay the hydro bill though, another $60 for 2 months hydro.
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Why the fuck replace hydro with nukes?
That is a good question. I wonder why you are asking that because I didn't see anyone suggest doing such.
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On an article about a hydro powered ship, you brought up nukes.
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Just how many more hydro power dams can we build before we run out of rivers worth a dam? Nobody is asking that we replace hydro with nuclear power, it's that we can't power the world on hydro alone. Calculations done on the demands for land, materials, and labor on renewable energy proves that we will need nuclear fission. When we run out of easy to dam rivers the demands for land, materials, and labor go up. Likewise as we use up the easy to catch wind and sun the land, material, and labor demands go
Avast, ye Mateys (Score:2)
Plunder awaits! It will be like in the good old days, just with less wenches to abduct and fewer gold doubloons, so we have nobody to ransom and first have to convert the goods back to gold in the harbor.
But at least we won't have to fight for the booty anymore, robots don't fight back. They may help you unlade, though. So they're better than crew, who may need supervision while doing it so they don't bail.
To a pirate, at least.
Indeed (Score:3)
""Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error, because of fatigue for instance,"
They are right, who can keep their eyes open for 8 miles, really.
Norway fully electrified and going autonomous (Score:1)
True but irrelivant (Score:2)
If the batteries are charged by a diesel burning power plant, I'm not sure this would prevent any emissions at all.
True, but irrellivant.
In Norway, 98 percent of the electricity production come from renewable energy sources. Hydropower is the source of most of the production. [regjeringen.no]
Nordic people are already living in the future (Score:1)