Look, no hands! The autonomous ship is coming closer
THE prospect of ships sailing the oceans with nobody on the bridge – or even nobody at all on board – has been the subject of this column before from time to time.
Research and development projects are under way around the world, while the rather different concept of remote control is already a reality in some sectors, including marine surveying.
Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) is central to the development of autonomous shipping.
Last week a press release from a Tel Aviv-based maritime technology company, Orca AI, caught my eye. At first glance, it was another update on technical progress towards autonomous shipping. But a closer look reveals it is a bit more than just that.
Founded in 2018, Orca AI claims to be the creator of the “world’s first-of-its-kind” automated situational awareness platform to maximise voyage safety and operational efficiency for ships and fleets.
The company says: “Powered by maritime purpose-built AI and computer vision technologies, the Orca AI platform empowers crew to make data-driven decisions in congested waters and in low-visibility conditions. Additionally, it allows fleet managers and operators to have a better understanding of their fleets’ performance and identify unsafe or risky and inefficient behaviours easily.”
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That sounds alright, as long as it is the officer of the watch (OOW) who is genuinely making the decisions. Just how confident the OOW might be in taking decisive action under an all-seeing Big Brother reporting back everything to head office could be questionable.
But this arrangement appears to be only a temporary stage anyway. Before too long, the ship will have said goodbye to the OOW altogether. That is possibly because he will be too old to do the job – something currently peculiarly Japanese (and we’ll come back to that in a minute).
Returning to the press release, Orca AI is apparently “set to continue its successful collaboration with NYK Group subsidiary MTI and partners, leveraging its industry-leading automated watchkeeper in the second development stage of the MEGURI 2040 project administered by the Nippon Foundation”.
The release explains that MTI, alongside “sister entity” Japan Marine Science, is spearheading the Designing the Future of Fully Autonomous Ships Plus (DFFAS+) consortium, comprising 51 Japan-based companies that will work together on the next phase of MEGURI 2040.
So it appears there is some considerable weight behind this project.
Then the release turns to the rationale for developing autonomous ships. It notes: “While the OECD projects that maritime trade volumes could triple by 2050, a skilled crew shortage is growing globally.” That is all pretty standard stuff.
That there is a shortage of skilled crew – or at least qualified officers – is generally accepted, but is not beyond addressing. Personally I would take assertions about the growth of maritime trade with a pinch of salt. It could be that stabilising, or even reducing, populations in many parts of the world combined with a shift to more local production, for a variety of reasons, could make the scene in 2050 look quite different.
Now we come to the really interesting bit, “Specifically, a diminishing, ageing population in Japan has made it difficult to find skilled personnel for coastal shipping. This lack of experienced crews has created an acute need to mitigate the risk of human errors in navigation, which could potentially result in maritime accidents.
“The Nippon Foundation’s MEGURI 2040 project has envisioned the fully autonomous navigation programme as a way to address these social issues, and the project was launched in 2020 with the aim to reach a full-scale commercialisation of fully autonomous ship technology by 2025.”
That is another way of saying the Japanese do not want to bring in suitably qualified younger officers from the Philippines, India, or wherever who would happily drive those coastal ships, just as they do in other parts of the world.
Before we get too sniffy about that, it might be worth remembering that open registry flags largely replaced national ones in much of the developed economies because of high crewing costs. Take away most of the crew and national flags look viable again.
Whatever the motivation, the results are impressive.
Orca AI reports that the first phase of MEGURI 2040 culminated in May 2022, with the successful autonomous trial voyage of the 749 gross tonnage NYK short-sea container ship Suzaku in congested waters off Japan’s east coast. Equipped with Orca AI’s automated watchkeeper, to replace the human lookout, the vessel achieved 40 hours of navigation with complete autonomy, or around 98 per cent of the voyage between Tokyo Bay and the port of Tsumatsusaka in Ise Bay. Data from the integrated display was livestreamed to the fleet operations centre in Tokyo, with the ship performing 107 collision avoidance manoeuvres and avoiding up to 500 other vessels en route.
There are a couple of interesting points there. The OOW and the lookout are not the same. There should be one of each on a normally manned vessel. Secondly, what was the role of the operations centre? Could it have intervened, or was there a real-life OOW sitting at the back of the bridge waiting to be called into action?
MTI director Dr Hideyuki Ando said: “Following the successful completion of the DFFAS+ project, we continue to develop autonomous navigational capabilities on the journey towards full autonomy. Orca AI’s advanced AI and computer vision technology have already proven to be key enablers of the safety of autonomous navigation, and we look forward to leveraging this cutting-edge technology in the DFFAS+ project.”
So “full autonomy” is the eventual objective. Quite what that means, and what should be allowed, are questions that many in the shipping industry are pondering right now.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has been working on how to regulate what it calls Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) since 2018.
An IMO working group has so far agreed on a few points.
First, that there is a need for a human master to be responsible for an autonomous vessel. Second, that the master may not need to be on board but must have the means to intervene when necessary. And third, that a single remote operations centre must be responsible for a MASS at any one time.
However, the working group is also looking at whether a master may be responsible for multiple MASS at the same time, and the roles and responsibilities of the crew (presumably if any) of MASS.
Meanwhile, Japan is forging ahead with MEGURI 2040 Phase Two, which will focus on demonstrating ship-shore operations using four different vessel types. These include a newly built container ship equipped with a fully autonomous operating system, an existing container ship, a roll-on, roll-off vessel, and a remote island route ship equipped for partial autonomous operations, as well as two fleet operation centres.
Like it or not, autonomous ships are set to be part of the future of shipping.
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