London-based conglomerate Rolls-Royce is currently developing technology for unmanned, autonomous large ships for the global shipping industry.
Rolls-Royce Marine Engineering & Technology Division, is developing and testing its fleet of autonomous ships right now in Turku, Finland and Japan & Norway.
The fleet is projected to be operational by the year 2025.
The ships are controlled by Rolls-Royce Intelligent Awareness System and are supposed to be able to undock, sail to the next port and redock.
They navigate via thousands of sensors, cameras, lidar and radar all over the vessel.
This information is sent to 3D NAND solid-state drives and a shockingly large 1 terabyte of data per day is generated! That’s one trillion bytes of data. Equivalent to about 728,000 floppy discs or 1,500 compact discs.
Currently, there are an estimated 100,000 large ships used for transporting goods internationally. This sort of technology would completely revolutionize the marine shipping industry.
Rolls-Royce is also working on an unmanned, autonomous Naval vessel.
Questions:
What if a cyber-terrorist hijacks the ships main computer system?
What if pirates block the ship at sea and rob its cargo and also strip it for parts?
If the ship malfunctions, how do you stop it from causing accidents?
Increased efficiency comes at the cost of eliminating hundreds of thousands of human’s jobs?
Rolls-Royce Autonomous Ship Report
Rolls-Royce Ship Intelligence
https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/marine/ship-intelligence.aspx#/
