This is what an undisrupted industry sounds like. You hear it from train driver unions, banks, and doctors.
There is merit in what they say about safety, but they see it not as a set of problems that might be overcome, but as a way of shutting down the conversation. They don't want to think about how easily a significant part of what they do could be automated or eliminated.
The heuristic is not that they object, it is that they don't want to discuss, even as speculation.
It's interesting that one place these objections haven't come up is air travel. Because if you think about it, air travel should be a place we fear to automated, but we already did it. Autopilot sort of sneaked in before people realized what automation was, and pilots are comfortable that they still have a place alongside the machines, so they are happy to talk, and explain as slowly as necessary that automated landing might be a good idea one day, but automating a crash landing wouldn't work out well.
The way this usually seems to work out is, everyone says it's impossible, until someone does it, and eats the other players alive. The most interesting thing here is that the insurers are the barrier. When drone designs are up and running, there will be a niche for an insurer that will take the risk, and in these days of crowd funding, you wouldn't need to be an entrenched player to take it.
The shipping industry has been disrupted many times. Two of the more recent ones are the transformation to containerized shipping, and the switch to slow steaming.
The Maersk's Triple E class ships, for example, are less powerful than the previous generation of ships.
The next disruption is likely the New Panamax will allow ships with up to 13,000 TEU through the Panama Canal, rather than the old limit of about 5,000.
This disruption, and the creation of the Panama and Suez canals, are counter-examples to your idea that people "don't want to discuss, even as speculation" disruptive ideas. Some don't - the British didn't want the competition to their India trade - but certainly many, including Napolean, wanted a Suez canal.
> The heuristic is not that they object, it is that they don't want to discuss, even as speculation.
What if I proposed a nuclear powered aircraft. There are obvious advantages, like unlimited range. Airports wouldn't need the fueling infrastructure, so flights to, say, Easter Island wouldn't have to also pay to get the jet fuel there for the return flight. Ground crew could smoke. It would be highly disruptive, yes?
Of course, there will be people who dismiss it right away. "The reactor and shielding will be too heavy", "there's too much risk in case of accident", "the R&D costs are too high", and so on. Most don't even want to discuss what nuclear powered air travel could do, even as speculation. Each one could shut down the conversation.
By your heuristic, airplane power production is an undisrupted industry.
While the reality is that those objections are absolutely true, and are some of the reasons why we don't have atomic aircraft.
This means your heuristic is wrong, or at least incomplete.
Some ideas are disruptive .. but either physically impossible or economically nonviable.
How do you judge if this ides isn't in one of those two categories? You presume that drone designs will be up and running at some point. What if that point is 100 years in the future? Why should people now be concerned with it?
It's not just the insurers but regulations. Although I wonder how much they can skirt around that, for example hiring a bunch of low wage unskilled workers to just sit on the ship doing nothing so it counts as "manned". Perhaps you could have the ship be remote controlled rather than completely autonomous. When something unexpected happened, a person takes over remotely, but otherwise it acts like autopilot.
Perhaps the boats could transfer cargo to and from manned boats in international waters to get around local regulations, or even just bring people on board the ship.
If they get a single insurer and a single tiny maritime nation onboard, then they can do everything easily. "Flags of convenience" work just fine for circumventing inconveniences.
It’s easy to miss the bigger picture here. With a fully automated unmanned ship you could explore business models that you otherwise would never consider.
For instance, With no humans aboard you could have a ship that is super slow and super energy efficient, it could cast itself out into currents, use a variety of novel locomotive methods in a significantly longer but cheaper journey. With no people aboard to pay, feed, etc, it wouldn’t matter how long it took.
While this is one novel scenario, which probably wouldn’t work for a million reasons, there are probably a hundred more ideas that would work for a automated ship that are currently unfeasible.
> With no people aboard to pay, feed, etc, it wouldn’t matter how long it took.
Yes, it would, because it would limit the number of times you can turn over your assets, as more of your assets will be locked up in goods in transit at any time, and no bank will offer you free credit for 100% of its value, so there's a real monetary cost to slower delivery. Of course that doesn't mean that slower delivery can't be a benefit, but there will be a cutoff point where it starts to cost more than you save.
Oil tankers actually run sophisticated on-board economic models to decide what speed to sail at. Depending on the price of oil, the cost of financing capital, the depreciation model for the ship, prevailing ocean currents, etc., they decide whether to run faster (ship fuel efficiency drops massively with speed) or slower.
As these factors change during the journey, the tanker adjusts its speed on an hour-by-hour basis.
One of Bill Gates' recommended books (1) was a great read:
"Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines" (2)
The very large and very slow rotating diesel engines used to power ships are incredibly efficient. Oil tankers run very slowly, gas a little faster, then bulk carriers, container ships (time value of those containers is higher than commodity oil and bulk, so they move) and fastest and least efficient of all are cruise ships. The size of some of those engines is fantastic.
Assuming the goods aren't time-sensitive, then it's just a normal investment. You get a larger reward, but it happens further in the future. Perhaps investors could buy the goods (or make a loan) after they leave the shore, sell them when they get back, and pocket the difference.
Sort of. It's not that simple. You can't just compare the rewards. You also need to compare the time element, because it limits how many rewards you can get.
For an illustration of how dramatic this can be, consider that a major factor of Apples success, for example, is that their inventory turnover has skyrocketed - to more than 60 times a year as of 2012, compared to ~36 times a year for Dell (inventory turnover was one of the things Dell used to be famous for) or about 15 times a year for RIM.
In other words in 2012, for every $1m of capital locked up in in inventory at any one time, if Apple had 10% margin before considering capital costs for the inventory, they'd make $100k per turnover, for $6m, while RIM would have made $1.5m.
That capital is not free - you're either facing borrowing costs or inability to invest it elsewhere.
(of course the shipping is clearly not the only thing affecting inventory turnover)
> Perhaps investors could buy the goods (or make a loan) after they leave the shore, sell them when they get back, and pocket the difference.
Banks have had revolving credit facilities to handle this kind of thing pretty much as long as banks have existed. This changes the numbers but not the overall principle.
To be clear: It is likely that there can be savings to make this way - I'm not disputing that.
E.g. there's already at least one cargo ship that uses a kite to save fuel costs by relying on wind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails ). Clearly that's one thing that might make it profitable to making smart decisions about routes that maximize fuel savings even if that may slow down the delivery.
My point is just that it isn't sufficient to look at the savings for a single shipment - you also need to consider that the shipment will tie up substantial capital, and that has a cost per day too, whether in credit costs or in reduced ability to turn over inventory, and that will create very real limitations on how much you can slow down ships and still see benefits.
How about an automated factory ship? It not only transports goods, it makes them, and delivers them to the place where they are most needed. Automated ships around the world could then do resupply.
Or what about fish farming that works more like cattle grazing: a boat that moves a net of fish around to searching for food and nutrients before returning to land for harvest.
>How about an automated factory ship? It not only transports goods, it makes them, and delivers them to the place where they are most needed. Automated ships around the world could then do resupply.
Sounds crazy, but this has sort of been proposed with seasteading. Taking boats or building in international waters so they don't have to deal with local regulations. For example there was a boat off the coast of California where immigrants could go to work until they could get into the US legally. Or boats that perform abortions outside of places where they are illegal. It's not so much of a stretch that this could be done for manufacturing.
I like your idea, but I think delivery time is still hugely important for the owners of the cargo. It is still inventory on somebody's books.
BTW, I feel this is one of those "why didn't anyone think of this before" situations. Hundreds of thousands of people in the maritime industry, and I bet this was totally off their radar (pun intended). It is still far-fetched, but now that someone has researched the details, it feels possible. I especially like the idea of more tech and comms jobs replacing difficult and dangerous work.
If you're interested in following the various maritime industries, gcaptain.com is a good website. They cover many aspects (shipping, drilling, ports, finance, insurance, piracy, wrecks, and rescues), and usually have great photos.
I agree about exploring new ideas, but I don't think the drifting ship is a good example. Intercontinental shipping is already dirt cheap thanks to containeraization, well under $50/ton IIRC. Also, a drifting or super-slow ship would have to run in such a way that it didn't present a hazard to other mariners by drifting across shipping lanes or suchlike, so managing that risk and insuring against wouldn't be cost-free.
What this unmanned slow boat would be good for would be trash pickup, something that's not really economical now but is nevertheless a real problem, especially int he pacific.
This reminds me of Google's internet balloon project. The balloons navigate solely by changing their elevation and relying on the fact that the wind travels in different directions at different elevations.
What could the pirates do? At the moment the hold the crew at gunpoint and ransom the cargo and crew for the insurance money.
With no way to stop the ship, and likely no way to easily get off, the pirates would just be passengers until the ship reached the final destination.
Most of the threat of piracy relates to the crew, not the cargo. It's not like they are lifting containers off ships or emptying oil tankers into their pirate refineries.
Not nearly all shipping routes have a piracy problem. They've suggested to use it initially in areas such as the Baltic sea - what would the pirates do after a successful boarding there?
They can't move the ship anywhere, they would be noticed by onboard cameras and would be reachable by both boats and choppers, so at they have an hour or two to fill their boats with stuff, drive them to the shore and abandon the boats there in order to have a chance in getting away.
Robbing freight trucks at gunpoint seems like a safer and more profitable business than that.
When you can legally consider anything moving on board to be a target, the stigma of unmanned drones mostly disappear. You can use a bunch of heavily armed drones circling around a ship on the high seas.
To do what? International doesn't sanction killing people in defense of property; deadly attacks on pirates are only permisible in the name of self-defense. See http://jcpa.org/article/piracy-and-international-law/ especially section III.a.
Besides the ethics of whether to treat pirates as criminals or not, you can't automatically assume anyone moving on board is a pirate; they could also be in need of rescue. Ships are supposed to render aid to distressed travelers on the high seas, AFAIK.
-I liked this quote: "“If everybody in the industry would say, ‘Yes, this is the way to go,’ then we are too late.”
-I think it's possible. It might also be viable to have a mix of a few manned ships (cargo or otherwise) leading a group of drone ships.
-We, as humans, need to get used to the fact that machines are going to become better (not to mention cheaper) than us at almost every task we now classify as human only.
-And this makes me envision a time in the future where Somali pirates use computers instead of guns to take over ships.
It's possible that they will be vulnerable remotely, but there is also the possibility to create interference or jam the signal with proximity to the ship. Maybe they will work in tandem with an online team...
I imagine the ships going through dangerous territory would probably have some sort of defense, if not munitions, then sound, laser, or other type. It's also not crazy to imagine that the ships would have flying drones on them for reconnaissance and other uses.
I am quite sure the options the military is exploring and now using to keep that from happening to their drones would be applied here.
Ships could be instructed to accept orders under very strict rules, perhaps even ignoring orders while operating in certain regions. Given full ability to understand their surroundings they could avoid collisions with anything that would seriously damage their hulls and ignore most smaller vessels that are acting in obvious means to try an intercept them. Plus with no crew on board you do not need to provide easy access to anything, just seal it.
I am more interested in driver less big rigs and trains. I figure that planes and ships are more heavily protected by union organizations.
I'm sure the military is working on that, and I imagine it is a lot harder to interfere with a drone flying thousands of feet into the sky, than to interfere with a ship that you could get very close to. Yet, it looks like Iran was able to use some sort of GPS Spoofing to take down a US drone last year [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... ]
This idea fails a basic reality check -- piracy. During my around-the-world solo sail (http://arachnoid.com/sailbook) I heard any number of accounts of cargo vessels being boarded by pirates late at night, to steal cargo and slip away undetected by the skeleton crew that shipping operators prefer. The idea of a robot vessel would only make this problem worse.
The article says, "Unmanned ships would also reduce risks such as piracy, since there would be no hostages to capture ..."
But much piracy, for example in the eastern Indian Ocean, is after cargo, not hostages. Pirates could disable the propulsion system of, then loot, a robot cargo ship in the far reaches of the Indian Ocean where governmental controls are much weaker than elsewhere.
You make a good point about coast guard inspections. But all goods could be inspected when they arrive in dock to unload. The coast guard boarding moving ships for inspection I imagine would happen more to tiny fishing boats/speed boats accused of drug smuggling, etc. I doubt they're casually stopping freightliners "just to take a look around".
As for blocking the GPS signal, again, you need to know where the GPS is hiding. It could be trailing 100ft behind the boat for all the pirate knows.
On Tuesday November 3, a special Israel Navy force intercepted and boarded the cargo ship "Francop". Some 500 tons of weapons, rockets, and missiles were uncovered aboard the vessel, disguised as civilian cargo and hidden among hundreds of other containers. - http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/Terrorism/Palestinian/Pa...
The Israeli navy released Monday afternoon the HMS Beethoven, a Liberian-flagged German vessel it apprehended 160 miles off the Israeli coast, on Sunday afternoon, on suspicion that it was carrying weapons headed to Gaza. Thorough overnight inspections of the cargo turned up nothing problematic, and the troops let the ship continue on its way. - http://www.timesofisrael.com/navy-releases-liberian-cargo-sh...
In January the amphibious transport USS San Antonio stopped a Russian-owned cargo ship, the Monchegorsk, in the Red Sea. US intelligence had received a tip that the freighter was carrying weapons exports from Iran – a violation of United Nations sanctions. A US Navy boarding party confirmed the presence of arms. ... As this incident shows, the US Navy and allies have ample experience at interdicting suspect vessels on the high seas. - http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2009/0624/p02s04-usmi....
So you are right, these are not "just to have a look around." They are being stopped for a reason. Also, these couldn't wait until the ship got into port. In the first case, the ship might have had a nuclear bomb.
And I think the coast guards and navies want to continue to be able to stop ships at sea in the future and inspect cargo.
Also, the GPS wouldn't be 100ft behind the ship. The antenna needs to be above the surface, which means there would need to be a (visible) cable pull it along, and there would be an extra wake.
Who said it had to be lethal? You would certainly be able to build a human unfriendly environment if you didn't have to differentiate between crew and pirates. It could be loud noises, bright lights, electrifying things, pepper spray mists, tear gas etc etc.
It wouldn't necessarily be autonomous but remote controlled. Or have a single manned boat with security forces on it guarding dozens of unmanned ships in a fleet.
So the pirates jam the radio frequencies for the control signal. Convoys are incredibly inefficient which is why they are only used in war time (it takes days to form a convoy due to loading times). And no security boat can protect hundreds of miles of ocean, which is why piracy is still alive today.
It's economically preposterous to have submersible cargo bulk carriers.
The maximum gross mass for a TEU is 24,000 kg. The volume is 38.5 cubic meters => density of 623 kg/cubic meter.
The density of sea water is about 1020 kg/cubic meter. Thus, to be neutrally buoyant, each TEU needs a countermass of at least 397 kg/cubic meter, or 15 tons.
A 5,000 TEU would have to lug around some 76,000 tonnes in the best of cases.
This could be handled with water, but that implies very large tanks (about equal to the amount of cargo), which greatly reduces the amount of cargo space available.
This is why merchant subs are only really appropriate for dense cargoes (like metals) or for very expensive cargoes (like chemical dyes, medical drugs, and mail; or cocaine for narco-submarines). Even then, it's only economically justifiable in order to run a blockade or bypass an ice sheet.
I think that's a solvable problem. As quoted in the article, just make the trouble of stealing cargo more hassle than it's worth. I'm not saying it'd be easy, but it's not the showstopper you make it out to be.
> As quoted in the article, just make the trouble of stealing cargo more hassle than it's worth.
If that were feasible, shipping companies would have done it already. As to piracy, a robot ship represents an added risk, not a reduced one. Just look at Internet crime and compare it with old-style bank robberies to see my point -- those who robbed Mt. Gox didn't have to risk a face-to-face confrontation with an armed guard. It's the same here.
> I'm not saying it'd be easy, but it's not the showstopper you make it out to be.
I'll bet that's what the backers of Bitcoin said -- until a week ago.
> If that were feasible, shipping companies would have done it already.
For shipping companies, it's not about feasibility. It's about profits. Thanks to insurance, they can afford to pay a ransom every now-and-then and therefore don't need to make the ships as secure as profits. Having no crew onboard would lower operating costs, leaving them with more money to spend on anti-piracy measures. And even then, they would only do it if the cost of adding said measures is less than the cost of insurance.
> Just look at Internet crime and compare it with old-style bank robberies to see my point
That's not really a fair comparison, is it. Bank robbers aren't after ransoms, and neither are the guys who robbed MtGox.
No, I don't think so, but the risks inherent in virtual currencies should now be obvious to everyone.
Bitcoin may recover, but I think in the long term, much better software and transaction protocols will be required than now exist. Remember also that Mt. Gox wasn't the only large online Bitcoin theft:
It might still make economical sense to hire a gunship to protect the "droneships" while passing high-risk areas.
Besides, take some of the money saved on salaries and use it for foreign aid to countries such as Somalia and you'd have stopped piracy before you know it.
> take some of the money saved on salaries and use it for foreign aid to countries such as Somalia and you'd have stopped piracy before you know it.
No, that certainly won't work. With all respect, it's naive to think that foreign aid can solve the problem of poverty. In many cases it makes the problem worse.
Consider the Diem regime in the early 1960s, South Vietnam. Copious American aid made the prior situation much worse, led to large amounts of corruption, and in part contributed to the eventual fall of South Vietnam.
Look at foreign aid programs that don't also address political and social issues like basic human rights and reproductive choice for women. They always fail, and many make the original problems worse.
Among some circles, disagreement with Bill Gates is a positive signal.
In seriousness though, I don't think your link disagrees with lutusp's comment. The Gates Foundation seems to care about human rights and reproductive choice, the lack of which causes aid to fail (as claimed by the parent comment). In other words, I think lutusp is saying that dumping money into an impoverished environment will lead to corruption and more poverty, but more involved approaches that directly liberate the people can work.
Bill Gates is pitching to have foreign aid directed through his charities. It certainly would make more sense for the aid to be directed through organizations with runs on the board and a capable organization.
I think the parent should probably have said 'direct government-to-government foreign aid usually makes things worse'.
Part of the thing Bill Gates is fighting against with his 'myth busting' is the bad reputation foreign aid has got because it goes directly from politician to politician, and not necessarily distributed or managed in accordance with what people know to work.
Your entire argument is based on the false assumption that foreign aid cannot be executed correctly. I would assume we have learned a thing or two since that 50 year old example took place.
How do these pirates actually unload cargo? Do they actually have a way to unload entire crates (seems unlikely), or do they just break into one crate and fill up a backpack with iPads?
During my around-the-world solo sail (http://arachnoid.com/sailbook), I saw and heard any number of pirate stories. For example, in the Strait of Malacca, pirates will show up after dark in two wooden boats (no radar signature) with a rope slung between them. They stretch the rope across the bow of a passing freighter, which puts a wooden boat on each side of the ship, dragged along with it. Then they climb aboard, break the seals of some cargo containers, steal some electronics or something else easy to to carry off, climb back down into their boats and release the rope.
Perfectly simple, low-tech, and because of the small size of modern cargo ship crews, likely to escape the attention of the crew.
I certainly don't mean to justify theft of any magnitude, but is this honestly even a big concern relative to the amount of cargo on these ships? It doesn't seem like it would be a problem large enough to significantly impact the decision whether to use drone ships.
Furthermore: if these thefts are not discouraged by the presence crews today, and are likely to even escape attention of the crew, it does not seem obvious whether or not removing the crew will make much difference.
They usually never intend to unload cargo, they just hold ship and/or crew hostage until they're paid a ransom. Hence the claim that without a crew on-board the risk of piracy goes down.
I was inquiring specifically about lutusp's comment:
> I heard any number of accounts of cargo vessels being boarded by pirates late at night, to steal cargo and slip away undetected by the skeleton crew that shipping operators prefer.
Pirates can wear gas masks. Flooding the deck of an autonomous ship with heavy gas has been discussed as a way to raise the barrier to entry for new piracy operations. An unresolved issue is how to reliably flush the bodies off the deck - one does not want to enter port (and foreign jurisdiction) with dead Somalians on board.
So you write "ENTIRE SHIP FILLED WITH POISON GAS. IF YOU BREAK IN, YOU WILL DIE." in multiple languages in a place where no one could miss it. It's about the deterrent factor more than anything else.
If this was a feasible idea, they would have done it already, to discourage piracy of manned ships -- just have the cargo areas sealed up and filled with poison gas. But it's not feasible for multiple reasons:
* A modern cargo ship isn't a rigid, airtight vessel, it's somewhat flexible and certainly not airtight above the waterline.
* Also, the cargo on a modern cargo ship isn't inside the ship as in the old "On the Waterfront" days when unskilled laborers loaded and unloaded ships, it's all out on the deck in the form of cargo containers:
> So then what is a crew on a normal ship going to do if pirates board?
You're not thinking this through. The reason pirates can board ships with relative safety is because the operators have realized that if they arm the crews, the pirates will simply kill everyone on board as a precaution. So a decision was made to avoid too much a show of force, because that would only invite retaliation in kind.
After a ship has been taken over, that's different -- that's the time for a show of force, but training and arming cargo vessel crews as part-time soldiers was obviously a bad idea.
I don't think you're following the entire path of this comment tree. I realize all and agree with most of those things you said, but they're not immediately relevant. I was responding to dethstar's comment, which indicated that "some people" don't think the lives of people should be taken even if they're attempting to pirate a ship.
You seem to recognize that force (and I assume you mean potentially deadly force) should be used against pirates, which is also my view. Dethstar claims that some people dispute this view.
> I was responding to dethstar's comment, which indicated that "some people" don't think the lives of people should be taken even if they're attempting to pirate a ship.
But that's true, and it's not based on humanitarian grounds, but pragmatic ones -- if we arm the crews of cargo ships and adopt a policy of killing people who try to board on the high seas, the pirates will simply shoot back sooner, board by force, and kill the crew as a precaution.
I speak as someone who had an armed standoff with pirates in the Indian Ocean, far from land, during my around-the-world sail (http://arachnoid.com/sailbook). As the pirates came alongside I didn't shoot, I only showed my gun, and the pirates had to decide whether they wanted to try to board a boat under gunfire. If I had started shooting instead, that would have invited instant retaliation from the armed pirates and I would have lost.
> But that's true, and it's not based on humanitarian grounds, but pragmatic ones
That's a very different belief than the one mentioned by dethstar. Dethstar was referring to killing pirates with poison gas on an unmanned ship, so as far as I can tell it's a moral or humanitarian belief. Your belief is pragmatic, but it wouldn't apply to unmanned ships where there is no crew to be in danger.
Piracy would have to become incredibly frequent and highly sophisticated to make a noticeable dent in the financials of the shipping industry. There are limits to what pirates can offload and carry home due to the necessity of using fast and/or stealthy ships.
I would imagine not every route has many pirates. If the container ship sails from China to California, it's spending most of its time in the middle of the ocean. Just because it won't work everywhere doesn't mean it won't work somewhere.
The crew doesn't prevent cargo theft by force, they prevent cargo theft by acting as a layer of surveillance. It's obvious the eyes of the crew can be replaced by cameras.
I don't know anything about shipping, but I wonder how much of the crews' time is spent in maintenance and repairs. Are they trained to fix common issues? What happens when the robot boats break down?
Or are they just there to fill minimum crew size regulations and babysit ships that mostly drive themselves anyways?
Speaking as a former ship engineer (and designer), the engineering crew is mostly there to operate and monitor the plant. This is done from a computer. Almost everything in a modern engine space is automated or can be operated remotely from the engineering control station (the aforementioned computer). That includes opening and closing valves, starting up and shutting down systems, troubleshooting, and so on.
Unfortunately some times the sensors or actuators break, so an engineer will have to do some manual work. I suspect older engineers are more likely to do this, because they still think their own intuition is better than some algorithm (case in point: see quote in article from the union representative).
As for maintenance, it gets done in port. There are times, however, when things break horribly, and the engineers have to fix it themselves while at sea or find a work-around. With a drone fleet, one way to deal with this may be to have engineering teams on stand-by, ready to helo to a broken drone ship and do repairs.
> one way to deal with this may be to have engineering teams on stand-by, ready to helo to a broken drone ship and do repairs.
If the ships travelled in groups of 3+ then in the event of a failure the other two ships could tow the failed ship? Is this feasible? I honestly have no idea.
Not with current ship designs. It takes an enormous amount of power to tow a loaded cargo ship. They're built with some power redundancy, but not enough extra to tow another loaded ship.
Adding to gk1's comment. Adding the power redundancy needed to tow another ship would obliterate all the fuel savings these ships (potentially) can achieve.
The ships are on autopilot in deep ocean. International regulations say you need a (human) lookout, but the main job of the watch officer is to be there to handle problems and make sure that the ship is where it's supposed to be.
But most of the rest of the time is spent doing maintenance. The ocean is a very harsh environment and things are always breaking/needing attention due to constant motion and corrosive salt air.
I don't know that there would be an overall savings since if routine maintenance isn't being done underway, while the ship is making money, then it has to be done in port when it's not. So now you have a long period when your expensive asset isn't turning a profit. I haven't been in the industry in a long time, but I was taught that the second highest operating cost of a ship at sea was wages (fuel is first). As a result, ships are essentially understaffed to keep those costs down. I had to laugh at his "quality of life" comment. When has any shipowner cared about his crew's quality of life? These are people who literally fall asleep on their feet from exhaustion.
I wonder what the payback period will be. You're removing the salary cost, but replacing it with more automation that has to be extremely high reliability due to the environment and distances traveled.
I too see this happening, and am always surprised these companies aren't pushing faster for this... I also think of delivery vans and lorries around the city - whenever I walk to work I see about a dozen delivery vans and lorries, all just driving back-and-forth to deliver bread to shops, etc. and I always think that one day, we'll totally automate all this...
How? A driver-less truck pulls up to the front of a corner store. Then what? Someone still has to take the (correct) product from the truck, load it on a hand cart, take it into each shop and put it on the shelves. Normally this is the driver of the truck, but if you automate him away then every shop-keep need a guy hanging around to unload the auto-delivery trucks all day or take time away from serving customers to do it themselves.
That is not a clear net win to me. It is a physical manifestation of automated phone support. Cheaper to implement by the company but more time consuming and less useful for the users and less efficient overall...
I've never seen a truck driver restock a shelve; what kind of shops are you thinking of? Unloading the delivery of boxes should possible to automate using a robot like those from Kiva Systems, even if harder due to less standard conditions.
It depends. I worked in a small convenience store in the late 80s. The bread delivery (loaf bread, donuts, hostess twinkies, and so on) would directly fill the specialized display stands for these items. Part of the job was to remove items past the sell date. Ditto for items like nuts, ice, and such.
Other items were ordered from a wholesale distributer. Those were delivered by truck to the loading dock in cardboard boxes. We moved those into the store, unpacked the boxes, and filled the shelves.
Beer and such was put into the walk-in by the driver, and we stocked the coolers as needed.
It will be a long time before the local ice distributer goes automatic (for economic reasons it makes sense to make and distribute ice very locally). But wholesale distributers? I can see a truck with a lift gate and some kind of robot to automatically unload the truck. We always had to be there to receive anyway, except it was a human with a dolly moving the boxes into the bay.
It's pretty common for food and drink products. I believe Coke and Pepsi are (in)famous for doing this. They basically rent the shelf space in grocery stores and then maintain the stocking of it so they fully control the presentation.
I see this as an ongoing model/strategy for grocery stores and other retailers: Taking the Amazon approach where they're just distributors, and you pay for the shelf space, and a fee per transaction.
The manufacturer/distributor sets the price and the grocer could care less whether any sells at all, as long as they find a way to keep getting foot traffic.
I used to see that all the time in my local 7-11. Soft-drinks, confectionary, anything that needs 'merchandising'. Employees run the registers, keep the store clean, and one or two of them have training to take inventory using a tablet computer (this was before the advent of iPads; I don't live near a 7-11 any more so for all I know they've moved on since then).
For example, my partner works at a clothes retail shop. There's dozens of staff who work non-stop throughout the day to sort out incoming deliveries. It's a clothes shop: things belong on retail shelves and are hung up, so don't you think that a delivery truck could drive up to it (automated?) and "connect" to the shop through it's back opening, connect some sort of bar and have a fully automated stock room.. I know this explanation is terrible but we see such amazing automated warehouses and factories that it amazes me sometimes that not more of the world is automated, especially when it comes to shipping/delivery trucks/restocking, etc...
> Cameras and sensors can already detect obstacles in the water better than the human eye.
I wish that was available on consumer sailing boats. There are lots of hazards for small vessels out there. And to be honest, lately big ships are one of them. No crew is actually watching anything other, but the radar & AIS, hence small boats can be destroyed and never found again.
As per piloting - the first crude autopilots were made in 1970s...
I see this as a reality. The majority of ships' machinery is already automated and/or controlled remotely, so it's not a huge leap to leave the operator(s) shoreside.
Do you think the reliability is up to it? I'm thinking of in relation to an airliner that was inspected just before a flight that will be at most 12 hours long.
OTOH, compare that to Oakland to Osaka (to pull two cities out of the air) and a trip taking around two weeks. What level of reliability do you need to have to ensure that nothing important breaks? Does this impose an additional cost that's less than the savings of having no crew.
It's an interesting idea that I'm sure will eventually happen but I'm wondering if it's really ready for prime time.
There are enough mechanical parts in a plant that at least one will break during a two-week voyage. However, reliability is already something that's being improved year-after-year, along with added fail-safe systems, so I don't suspect it'll be a great barrier.
That reminds me of the futurist joke: In the future a {plane|factory|boat} will have only a dog and a human in it. The human is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to make sure the human doesn't touch the controls.
I suspect the bigger problem is that ultra reliable ships with state-of-the art communications and robotics will seldom be cheaper than a creaky old tub manned by Filipino sailors, especially Filipino sailors willing to accept non-unionized wages.
I think the major problem is that piracy has always, till now, had someone to "repel boarders".
Now it is a matter of climbing on board and breaking the locks. (And no I don't think automated guns will be an acceptable solution. I can't see the NY port Authotirty being happy about armed computers sliding into view.
(Why am I thinking of the Matrix cartoon / prequels now?)
Assuming you get boarded by pirates, what happens next? Why would you need a bridge that could command the ship? Even if you did, turn it off unless you can remotely switch it on again. How much damage can pirates do to an empty ship? Plus, no hostages, so there wouldn't be much stopping armed forces going in guns-blazing.
Is "towing it to port" really something that is that easy to do? These are big ships that are probably not easy to make disappear. Also, without hostages, using armed forces to take the ship back would probably be a lot easier.
Finally, depending on the cargo and location, I would imagine selling off the cargo would be a simple matter.
Negativity aside, this looks like the future I hope that consumer grade cars/transportation will eventually have this. I can imagine a highway of the future with a lane for autonomous vehicles instead of truck drivers.
What happens when armed pirates board a manned ship? The crew is unarmed and is supposed to lock themselves in a secure room, which is exactly the same as a computer would do.
The unmanned option is better in case of piracy, since due to lack of hostages there is less pressure for ransom and it's safer to re-capture the ship before it can be delivered to a pirate friendly port.
The real vulnerability of unmanned ship is against small-scale theft (a rubber dinghy boarding, opening a container and stealing a few TVs), but for large cargo ships thieves can do the same without the crew noticing; so it can be covered by insurance probably.
Right, but I was thinking about the damage they could do or what happens if they shut the engines off. Who will come and get the ship and how long will that take. Help could be days away how much could be stolen in that time.
I believe the pirates are in it for the insurance money for the hostages anyway I doubt they want to fence any actual goods.
With no human operable "helm" there is no way to divert the ship, short of posessing an engine more powerful than the ship's engine, and no crew to hold hostage. Potentially some containers could be opened and looted, but the practical amount of looting is a fraction of one container.
The real objections should be about failure modes of ships and what a crew can to to mitigate them. But even this angle is susceptible to the possibility that the safest crew and ship is an un-crewed ship. If you are not on the ship, you can't cause an accident, and you won't die in an accident.
> With no human operable "helm" there is no way to divert the ship, short of posessing an engine more powerful than the ship's engine
Because engines are impossible to disable, GPS is impossible to spoof, and control systems are impossible to hack even with unlimited physical access.
> no crew to hold hostage
There's a fancy robotic ship and a bunch of cargo to hold hostage.
> the practical amount of looting is a fraction of one container
How do you reckon? I suppose if the value-density of the cargo were low enough then nobody would have incentive to steal it, so they would have to threaten to destroy it instead.
> The real objections should be about failure modes of ships and what a crew can to to mitigate them.
You're absolutely right. But piracy is one of those failure modes.
There are low hundreds of attempts and a few dozen successful ship hijackings per year. It is, overall, a very small part of freight theft, the vast majority of which happens on land. This should be obvious: on land, you don't need a boat big enough to float a container to steal a container. You just need a access to a semi-tractor and maybe a trailer.
If you make the technical demands on a successful hijacking higher, I expect these numbers to fall.
I also expect self-driving trucks to sharply cut theft, rather than enable it.
Can you elaborate why you believe self-driving trucks would reduce theft?
They feel like the easiest thing to rob on any low-traffic road - you need two people in masks, one walks in the middle of the road in front of the truck so it stops in order to avoid "traffic accident", the second one takes whatever he wants from the back, and both leave through a side path too narrow for the truck to follow. Even if you get a cop car there within 10 minutes, all you've got is a video without faces.
Consider that a self-driving truck would spend less time parked.
What proportion of loss do you think comes from robberies as opposed to theft when the barrier is reduced to finding an unguarded stationary vehicle? My guess is that robberies makes up a tiny proportion, and that they'd continue to be rare because of the perceived barrier of having to stop the vehicle.
Less predictability = more risk to the robbers, as they have to deal with the driver.
1. It would be harder and less safe to force him to stop the truck - drivers expecting a robbery sometimes don't stop in dangerous situations but attempt ramming the robber or running away at some risk; an automated car would be much more passive since the liabilities for running over a pedestrian are of a much higher priority.
2. For a manned truck to be robbed that way it would generally need to be an armed robbery, and at least in Europe most thieves don't have any easy access to guns;
3. If you get caught, you have a chance to get away from charges - it isn't a crime as such to walk in front of a truck, and the prosecution may fail to prove your connection to whoever actually takes the stuff;
4. This may be done also by young teens/preteens who are almost immune to criminal charges even if they get caught; currently they are limited mostly to shoplifting, but this would be within their abilities.
I would like to see some redundancy in navigational equipment before this becomes a reality. Currently ships only have traditional navigation methods to fall back on if satellite navigation fails. While there are some projects underway to find a seamless replacement for GNSS [1], none are quite there yet.
12 to 15 percent more efficient because you eliminate people? And where is the part where a miricle occurs and the laws of physics are modified?
The efficiency and pollution problem with cargo ships can't be fixed with more crgo ships. That's just insane. Build a dedicated high-speed nuclear, wind and solar powered high speed cargo train connecting the US coasts and the gulf. This alone would eliminate some ten thousand cargo ships per year making the trek through the Panama Canal. During this trek they burn over a million dollars of bunker fuel, the nastiest most polluting fuel you can burn.
Methinks this is just one of those "let's burn government money 'cause they don't know any better" scams. Not the first time.
"By replacing the bridge -- along with the other systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning, water and sewage..."
It's not just eliminating people. It's eliminating the whole bridge, and adding more cargo. And the 12 to 15 percent number might be a "fuel per unit of cargo" number, not necessarily "total fuel per boat".
"Build a dedicated high-speed nuclear, wind and solar powered high speed cargo train connecting the US coasts and the gulf"
Who do you propose pays for this, the government which "don't now any better"? Private companies?
If this was actually cheaper than burning a million dollars of fuel, they would have done it already.
And I doubt trains could carry nearly as much cargo as a large cargo ship.
Of course I did. And I am disputing these numbers.
The Maersk triple e class cargo ships can carry 18,000 containers. There is no way removing crew quarters will make room for another 1,800. For one thing, even an autonomous ship must have the ability to be crewed from onboard due to safety/emergency considerations. It's a pipe dream, a stunt, just like Amazon delivering packages in a busy city using drones.
The hydrodynamic drag of these ships by far overwhelms the cost equation. The only way you are going to save 10% is by slowing down. And you can do that just fine with a crew. In fact, this is precisely what they do to control costs. I did extensive research on this topic about three years ago. If I remember correctly, the trip from Shaghai to Europe through the Suez canal takes approximately 32 days. When fuel costs spiked cargo ships slowed down to make the same trip in sixty days in order to control costs.
I could be wrong, of course. Based on what i know I just don't see how automation could make such an impact. The 800 pound gorilla isn't the crew quarters, it's physics.
Also, slowing down with a crew means continuing to pay them for the extra days. Slowing down w/out one should not incur significant extra costs, making it worthwhile to do so.
You are trying to support a position that is simply not supportable. The cost of the crew is a mere rounding error when you consider fuel, insurance and other costs. I don't have the time to dig up my research from several years ago for all the details. As an example, I remember that crossing the Panama Canal costs several hundred thousand dollars for a PANAMAX class ship.
This whole idea of slowing down the ships doesn't work because there's an asymptotic function attached to that idea. You can't wait half a year for 20,000 containers to get from China to Europe or the US. Business can't be conducted effectively when delivery times start getting ridiculous. Sixty days from China to Europe was horribly painful and it hurt business and economies in multiple ways.
Again, I could be wrong. I'd like to read more. From my current vantage point this is as viable an idea as delivering books in Manhattan using drones.
Assuming the New Panamax toll is similar to the 2011 toll of $72/TEU listed at https://www.pancanal.com/eng/op/tolls.html gives about $400,000 for a crossing. This corresponds to 10 days of sailing. Note that there's another day for transit.
To double check, the Panama Canal saves about 13,000 km of travel. Slow steaming is about 35 km/hour, or about 15 days of sailing. Thus, for the cost of 11 days of sailing one can save 14 days, making the Panama Canal fee entirely reasonable.
It would be cool technology and cut emissions (12 to 15% is not bad at all) but I don't want to be on a dismasted yacht doing ocean crossing in the middle of a storm with all the nearest vessels computer-controlled, without life-support systems, unable to help me
Yachts aren't the only ships on the oceans which might need rescue. Consider a similar scenario with a fishing trawler stranded at sea instead of a yacht.
It's possible to do a cost-benefit analysis, but it's not meaningful if it only takes into account adventure yachtists.
What about fishing boats which have been hit by freighters (as in http://gcaptain.com/dutch-freighter-sinks-french-trawler/ )? Do the owners of uncrewed freighters have no culpability or responsibility in helping contribute towards a safety net even though the freighter might be the cause of a problem?
Here's a case where a cargo ship hit a ferry - http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/18/world/asia/philippines-shi... . The crew of the cargo ship, plus the navy, Coast Guard and other commercial vessels, worked to rescue some of the passengers. If commercial vessels were uncrewed then that's fewer ships that could have helped.
First, that's a conjecture. It assumes that uncrewed ships will be safer. (Eg, it may end up colliding into other ships more often.)
Second, you don't know what you are talking about, because there's no way to get "vastly fewer ships".
There are some four million fishing vessels, of which 1.3 million are decked and about 40,000 of them are longer than 24 meters (over 100 tons). These are not going to be uncrewed because we haven't automated fishing.
According to the CIA factbook at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... there are 16,406 vessels in the world's merchant marine. Of those, over 1,722 (I stopped counting at Norway) are passenger or passenger/cargo ships which cannot be uncrewed.
Removing the crew from the 14,000 remaining ships is not going to "vastly" reduce the number of ships with crews that will need to be rescued. It will, on the other hand vastly reduce the number of ships with the capacity to help in an offshore rescue. (A commercial troll vessel with a crew of 4 doesn't have the extra safety equipment that a, say, Handymax bulk carrier carries, and can't handle the same weather conditions.)
When each shipment nets maybe $30,000,000 for the shipping company and you pay about £20,000 for the crew during that time, you'd need to save a lot of money elsewhere to make this worthwhile.
You're forgetting costs associated with crew beyond pay. You also have to pay for food, insurance etc.. there's the risk of hostages being taken. Additionally, removing the bridge/crew quarters makes for more space to put containers, the ships could end up looking like barges with the entire top surface covered in containers.
I'm not sure that's accurate. The article mentions this:
>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.
That would be what, 10 days at sea? Are they really that fast? Even if so, where does 44% come from?
How would they be necessarily faster and less polluting?
Sure, waste from crew activities is part of the output, but most of it could be recycled or composted. The big source of pollution is the diesel engines, and those wouldn't change much.
And faster? Whatever weight savings came from removing crew accommodations would just be used to fit more TEUs for the trip.
I had the same question. I suppose they might be referring to newer technology to limit emissions and maybe bio-diesel? Other than that I don't see why removing the crew would be less polluting.
Edit: According to the quote [1], it seems like the engines wouldn't necessarily be more efficient but rather more cargo per ship increasing the shipment to fuel ratio. Somewhat similar to CSX's fuel saving slogan "Trains can move a ton of freight nearly 450 miles on a single gallon of fuel." [2].
[1] - "By replacing the bridge -- along with the other systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning, water and sewage -- with more cargo, ships can cut costs and boost revenue, Levander said. The ships would be 5 percent lighter before loading cargo and would burn 12 percent to 15 percent less fuel, he said."
They aren't necessarily worried about the cargo simply offsetting the weight. It's the fact that the space previously used for the bridge and human living area is used for cargo instead. Ultimately this would increase the shipment to fuel ratio per cargo ship.
Piracy is often profitable because of ransoms paid for crew as far as I know. The article seems to directly address this. With no crew on board, how would the pirates stop the ship from just continuing on to port with them on it? I suppose they could threaten to destroy the ship or something on the ship but that's no different than the situation now.
One of the few, and more unusual captures in which that wasn't the case:
"Pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with more than $100 million worth of crude oil off the coast of Kenya, seizing the largest ship ever hijacked"
The $3 million ransom was a small price for a ship and cargo worth, together, a quarter billion dollars. Even for an unmanned ship, the owner has plenty of reason to to pay ransoms that are a literally pennies on the dollar compared to losing the ship completely.
This was my initial thought. Then I realised whatever sensors are on-board these things would likely detect incoming pirate attacks (of the physical kind) from miles away (think satellites). At which point nearby naval forces would be alerted.
Hell, you could go a step further and equip each one with it's own drone to defend itself in case of attack.
> these things would likely detect incoming pirate attacks (of the physical kind) from miles away (think satellites). At which point nearby naval forces would be alerted.
If it were so, wouldn't such systems be already installed on manned boats? There's nothing here that is tied to the boat's capability of self-steering.
This also. Without hostages the pirates are open to a world of hurt. Here's to hoping the Somalian pirates won't need to be as desperate by the time these ships set sail.
i love how everyone here latches onto bad pirates boarding a drone.
why would a drone ship have any human navigable rigging? drones do not have cockpits, life support systems, etc. a drone ship would have cargo containers all around, no bridge, no control room, etc.
how do you board something that has no surface meant for humans?
Those containers were attached to the deck or other containers, and inspected. That requires humans to have access to the containers to lash them down, at least for those which reach above the deck. This requires a surface meant for humans.
This could also provide more information about the oceans being totally automated. They would need to map the ocean (and problems) more closely to navigate.
I just hope they can still find and pickup Tom Hanks and Wilson.
There is merit in what they say about safety, but they see it not as a set of problems that might be overcome, but as a way of shutting down the conversation. They don't want to think about how easily a significant part of what they do could be automated or eliminated.
The heuristic is not that they object, it is that they don't want to discuss, even as speculation.
It's interesting that one place these objections haven't come up is air travel. Because if you think about it, air travel should be a place we fear to automated, but we already did it. Autopilot sort of sneaked in before people realized what automation was, and pilots are comfortable that they still have a place alongside the machines, so they are happy to talk, and explain as slowly as necessary that automated landing might be a good idea one day, but automating a crash landing wouldn't work out well.
The way this usually seems to work out is, everyone says it's impossible, until someone does it, and eats the other players alive. The most interesting thing here is that the insurers are the barrier. When drone designs are up and running, there will be a niche for an insurer that will take the risk, and in these days of crowd funding, you wouldn't need to be an entrenched player to take it.