Samsung floats autonomous ships as ready to sail in 2022
- Reference: 1613023271
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/11/samsung_autonomous_ship/
- Source link:
The Chaebol says it’s teamed with Korea’s Mokpo National Maritime University to fit the Samsung Autonomous Ship system to a 133m-long, 9,200 tonne training vessel and sail it from the port of Mokpo to the island of Jeju.
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Passenger ferries make that journey in around five and a half hours, the route features some narrow channels and numerous small islands.
Samsung’s automation won’t have an easy time of it.
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If successful, Samsung Heavy hopes to start selling its maritime automation kit in 2022.
Doing so won’t immediately change the maritime industries, because the training vessel has around a fifth the displacement of small cargo ships and is well shy of the 200,000-tonne-plus behemoths that roam the oceans. Scaling to handle such craft will take time. But with crew often hard to come by in the unglamorous world of oceanic transport, automation clearly has a role to play and as one of the world’s largest ship-builders Samsung wants in.
Japan’s Mitsui E&S does too and announced autonomous ship trials this week.
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Back in Korea, meanwhile, car-makers Hyundai and Kia on Monday both issued statements that they’re not working with Apple on a car. Both companies were rumoured to be assisting the Mac-maker with its long-alleged ambition to build even more expensive wheels than the [4]$699 set it sells for the Mac Pro . The Korean companies’ share prices dipped after they told investors that rumours of their involvement in Applemobiles had no substance. ®
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Re: Boarders!
By not having any cabin space for them to occupy?
If pirates want to sit on top and go for a ride, I’m sure people won’t mind. Maybe they could paint the vessels bright yellow and make them bounce up and down a bit too.
Re: Boarders!
How does this autonomous ship handle hackers?
the massive investments in so many sectors, the rush to put people out of work. how utterly stupid.
The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1765 - and you've only just noticed that technology has the potential to take people's jobs?
It is possible to have a broad conversation about what work is for, whether it is purely to provide food, shelter and sanitary facilities, or whether it is to provide people with a sense of purpose, or perhaps it has become a means of determining status in lieu of ceremonial dancing, fighting or willy waving.
Some ways of starting such a conversation are better than others. For example, famous Welshman Bertrand Russell penned an essay titled The Case for a Leisure Economy. A fair gambit. Conversely, just writing 'utterly stupid' just doesn't cut it.
Me too!
I’ve been involved in several autonomous shipping projects at Kongsberg for the last 18 months (since I joined the company).
[1]https://www.kongsberg.com/maritime/support/themes/autonomous-shipping/
[1] https://www.kongsberg.com/maritime/support/themes/autonomous-shipping/
How secure is GPS ?
I hope it is, otherwise Somalian pirates just need to hover a drone with a fake GPS signal above the ships antennas to beach it.
Re: How secure is GPS ?
GPS can be validated and verified against inertial navigation and other radio navigation signals. GPS is easier to jam than it is to spoof.
Safety?
Two decades I knew a chap who'd been second mate on a container carrier. He'd given this up and gone to work on a nuclear reactor (where I met him) because "it was less dangerous". He told me that, on ships with stopping distances measured in miles, nobody on the bridge was capable of navigating without the onboard technologies. They would "drop the pilot, engage the satnav and put their feet up on the console" (his words).
Given the crowded seas and the reliability of transport automation demonstrated so far ("Windows for warships", Tesla autopilot, 737 MAX), I wonder whether autonomous shipping is the best of ideas. It's a much harder task to stay on course at sea than it is in the air, let alone to follow a road, and preventing collisions requires a lot of attention, forethought and judgement.
The bean counters will love the idea of no salaries for crew, although they might need some emergency standby personnel on board to reboot the computer when it crashes.
Re: Safety?
>>They would "drop the pilot, engage the satnav and put their feet up on the console" (his words)
Yup. Got a relative who used to, in his words, "get paid for putting his feet on the desk and looking out of the window". He was towing oil rigs across the Pacific at the time.
So I too am not sure what the new bit that Samsung Heavy are offering is - perhaps displacing the need for a pilot?
went to a talk about this a couple of years ago
Back in the day when you were able to go to these strange places that served beer and food.
This was the Cruising Association in Limehouse and a guy was giving a talk about how all ships would be at least semi autonomous soon. He scared me as he had no concept of secure design. Every time I or someone like me pointed out that most computer networking was inherently insecure by design he waffled on about how you would have to patch things regularly. He was also far too excited about how a small camera could give amazing target definition. I suspect that distinguishing between a small boat and a LANBY is going to be a struggle when said software is only expecting the LANBY.
A "crashed" oil tanker is going to bring a new angle to the Bork, Bork, Bork column!
I suspect...
That these behemoths will still need at least a small crew if only to make sure it doesn't suddenly stop working. Freak out over conditions beyond it's comprehension etc etc.
I mean, planes can fly themselves from start to finish with very little input. But you don't see pilots getting the boot anytime soon™ (not to mention the amount of trouble automated drones have been causing).
And that's before you consider things like bits of the scenery changing from time to time like you do at sea (think sandbanks for example) since all maps are only as good as the last time they were drawn up (and even then they can still be wrong).
Awesome
Fingers crossed it works and works well. If there are solutions against piracy on these automated ships it could make global trade safer and easier. I also imagine it would be of benefit to international emergency aid after disasters.
Will Samsung take the cost of cleaning the coasts if something goes wrong?
Boarders!
How does this autonomous ship handle pirates?