As guess this would qualify as great news for sea-faring pirates.
Most pirates aren't actually after cargo I'd assume. They're just taking hostages and ransoming them.
Couldn't they ransom the cargo?
Autonomous Ships
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: Autonomous Ships
#22As far as my knowledge goes about the shipping industry: ships are already 90% automated (since they simply go straight forward for days/weeks). There is not much to do for a captain/officer whilst in the middle of an ocean. AFAIK most of the humans on board of a vessel are there to perform maintenance (most of which can be done during transit). Yes, we can automate the last 10% to make the ship sail itself, but we'd…
Maybe fully autonomous ships should have maintenance performing robots then?
Honest question. Have you ever been in the engineering spaces in a ship/offshore rig/etc.? Do you have any idea of the diverse type of work a ship's engineer and his various reports do?
I don't mean to pick on you too much but the idea that you can have little Hueys, Deweys, and Louies tooling around a container ship doing whatever maintenance is required is ludicrous.
And the other suggestions about having crews that you transport from ship to ship isn't quite as unrealistic but is needlessly complicated in the way that software often is. Among other things--have the people suggesting this sort of thing ever been in the North Atlantic in bad weather?
Re: Autonomous Ships
#23As guess this would qualify as great news for sea-faring pirates.
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Re: Autonomous Ships
#24I would love to work on this kind of software. It's exactly the type of things I find interesting, it's a shame I didn't make different career choices when I was younger but it is what it is I guess.
What makes you think you can't work on this type of software?
Re: Autonomous Ships
#25As guess this would qualify as great news for sea-faring pirates.
Pirates are after hostages, not cargo, generally. It's very hard to crack the cargo anyways - it's usually stored in a solid steel 20-to-40 foot shipping container with solid steel lashings bolting everything together. You'd need to be able to cut through a lot of steel, but then moving the actual cargo itself would require, well, a large vessel. Selling it would be a very involved process. All of this puts sea pirac…
It's very hard to crack the cargo anyways - it's usually stored in a solid steel 20-to-40 foot shipping container with solid steel lashings bolting everything together.
The other plan would be go on board and reprogram the ship to go elsewhere, the nearest deserted coast say, maybe carry the ship's beacons a ways away in a different direction before dumping them in the sea.
I'm sure if you crash a whole container ship on the coast of Somalia, your confederates could manage to get money out of the contents.
Edit: Also I recall stories of pirates who hacked container companies to actually find where the valuable stuff was. And containers are steel but they aren't designed for any real security.
Re: Autonomous Ships
#26As guess this would qualify as great news for sea-faring pirates.
Time to add robotic turrets to the sides of the ship...
Re: Autonomous Ships
#27Re: Autonomous Ships
#28I would love to work on this kind of software. It's exactly the type of things I find interesting, it's a shame I didn't make different career choices when I was younger but it is what it is I guess.
What makes you think you can't work on this type of software?
I'm 37, I have few academic qualifications so to transition would require 4-5 years more education and then I'd be a 42-43 year old competing against guys coming straight out of university with a background in desktop and web application development.
Practicalities really.
Re: Autonomous Ships
#29By one consultant's estimate, moreover, carrying sailors accounts for 44 percent of a ship's costs. I find this hard to believe even if autonomous ships can be done without a bridge. The Emma Maersk has 15,000 TEU and a crew of 13 http://www.emma-maersk.com/specification/
"Crew costs of $3,299 a day account for about 44 percent of total operating expenses for a large container ship, according to Moore Stephens LLP, an industry accountant and consultant."[1] The Maersk triple E's have a crew of 13 and consume ~136 tonnes/day of bunker fuel[2] which costs currently ~$315/tonne[3], for a daily fuel cost of $42,840. So right off the bat that number is very suspect. Even for other ships li…
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Re: Autonomous Ships
#30By one consultant's estimate, moreover, carrying sailors accounts for 44 percent of a ship's costs. I find this hard to believe even if autonomous ships can be done without a bridge. The Emma Maersk has 15,000 TEU and a crew of 13 http://www.emma-maersk.com/specification/
Rough calculations: 1 truck is 2 TEU/1 driver; 1 ship is 15K TEU/15 crew members. Time shifts and speed differences aside, ships are several hundred times more efficient than trucks in terms of TEU per unit human labor.
I could believe human labor being 44% of the cost of operating a ship, but the cost of operating a ship is also next to nothing. It's the last mile that engulfs these costs. Economically speaking it may not make a lot of sense to make ships autonomous.
But making ships autonomous is probably a lot easier than cars or airplanes, and could probably considered low-hanging fruit in the tech world. You don't need fancy computer vision algorithms to deal with a ship; GPS alone will probably do. Ships don't get within several hundred meters or even kilometers of each other.