Unmanned Maritime Vehicles for Shipping

 Photo: Rolls Royce

I’ve always been fascinated with robotics in air, space and on the ground, never really giving the water much of a thought. Living in the middle of the country may have contributed to that. With the earth being majority water and having some of the most hostile environments, it makes sense that it would be a domain for unmanned vehicles. The article I read to help understand unmanned maritime vehicles a little more was Autonomous ships: a review, innovative applications and future maritime business models by Ziaul Haque Munim. Although a lot of it was about the business models that could be used it did have a lot of information on how the systems are used and being developed.

There are several uses for unmanned maritime vehicles such as inspection, mapping, and science, but the one that interested me was autonomous shipping. Autonomous shipping started in 2012 in Norway with the development of the Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks (MUNIN). It was a collaboration with several other European countries and started due to the lack of seafarers along with the fact that 40% of Europeans live in coastal areas, but over time it started to focus on economic and environmental benefits (Munim, 2019). Munim goes one to discuss what the economic and environmental benefits are. A few that interested me are cutting seafarer salary to zero saving what is currently 45% of total operating cost (Kretschmann, et al, 2017), Increasing the ship capacity by removing accommodation for seafarers (DNV GL n.d.-a, 2018), and safety with fewer fatalities, collisions, and vulnerability to maritime piracy (Arnsdorf, 2014). Although the later one, I don’t really agree, even if the pirates can’t control the ship due to lack of control room, any ship can be towed when systems are disabled and without having to deal with hostages it makes it an easier target. Governments would be less likely to help ships without human lives involved. The major benefits that I could see after further reading would be Shipping in the arctic and creating shipping trains although not literally. With seaways opening in the north artic and countries investing more in Ice breakers the northern sea route would be a place for unmanned maritime vehicles. With the harsh weather and seas, the investors wouldn’t have to worry about human life nor all the customs and visa paperwork. This shipping lane in the artic cuts the shipping time 10 days from Asia to Europe instead of going through the Suez Canal (Liu et al, 2010.).  The second thing would be creating networks between the autonomous ships and playing follow the leader with a manned ship being the leader while the rest that followed would be autonomous, creating a ship train and saving cost. Experimenting in vessel-to-vessel communication using real-time wireless communication has been done by Sanden and Hovland in 2017 and is based on the platooning concept used in road transportation although I had never heard of the word platooning being used in that way. In any case, continuing the development of this technology would help with bringing platooning to shipping with fixed routes. This would also be more acceptable with the public due to the lead ship still being manned.

I agree with autonomous shipping being the future. It is a task that requires little to no human operations mainly till it gets closer to shorelines and ports. Munin talks about four ways of going autonomous and three of them still involve human beings having control around ports.  Ports will need to be updated and tested with autonomous shipping for it to truly take off, although this could be costly. Doing only the major ports around the world could be a possibility. This could help with logistics and stop the shipping congestion outside of the ports like the one I’ve seen every time I have flown in and out of Las Angeles. A large number of ships anchored offshore waiting to be offloaded. Combine this system with unmanned cranes onshore and it would speed up even more. Having a continuous supply stream of the world's resources anywhere in the world could also help develop a lot more of it too.

Citations

Arnsdorf, I. (2014). Rolls-Royce Drone Ships Challenge $375 Billion Industry: Freight. Retrieved on https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-25/rolls-royce-drone-ships-challenge-375-billion-industry-freight

DNV GL. n.d.-a. (2018). ReVolt – Next Generation Short Sea Shipping. Retrieved on https://www.dnvgl.com/news/revolt-next-generation-short-sea-shipping-7279

Liu, M., and J. Kronbak. (2010). The Potential Economic Viability of Using the Northern Sea Route (NSR) as an Alternative Route between Asia and Europe. Journal of Transport Geography 18: 434–444. doi: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2009.08.004.

Kretschmann, L., H.-C. Burmeister, and C. Jahn. (2017). Analyzing the Economic Benefit of Unmanned Autonomous Ships: An Exploratory Cost-Comparison between an Autonomous and a Conventional Bulk Carrier. Research in Transportation Business & Management 25: 76–86. doi: 10.1016/j.rtbm.2017.06.002.

Sanden, S., and G. Hovland. (2017). Inverse Kinematic Control of an Industrial Robot Used in Vessel-to-Vessel Motion Compensation. 2017 25th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), 1392–1397. Valletta, Malta: IEEE.

Ziaul Haque Munim (2019) Autonomous ships: a review, innovative applications and future maritime business models, Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal, 20:4, 266-279, DOI: 10.1080/16258312.2019.1631714