Rolls-Royce looks to plot a course to the future with drone ships

December 26, 2013 3:42 pm

Rolls-Royce looks to plot a course to the future with drone ships

By Mark Odell

Amazon may have embraced the robotics revolution with the promise of drones making deliveries to your door, but Rolls-Royce has taken it one step further and is predicting the first drone cargo ship will enter service in the next decade.The UK engineering group, one of the world’s largest suppliers to the commercial shipbuilding industry, has called for a public debate on the switch from crewed cargo vessels to autonomous ships as part of a wider drive by industry to use advanced automation technology.

“The idea of a remote-controlled ship is not new, it has been around for decades but the difference is the technology now exists,” said Oskar Levander, head of marine innovation engineering at Rolls-Royce.

He said that although an ocean-going vessel was probably still several decades off, a robo-ship could start operations on local sea routes serving one jurisdiction, such as US coastal waters or within the European Union, if regulators were ready to embrace changes earlier.

“I think it will take more than 10 years before you have all the global rules in place, but you may have a local administration that is prepared to run [remote-controlled ships] sooner.”

He said the main stumbling block to the acceptance of drone ships was the complex international rules governing seafaring, which could take decades to unravel and renegotiate.

Without those barriers removed, there would be little appetite to develop a robo-ship. “Let’s not make it sound too simple. It would require a lot of work but the fact is we can make it happen faster technologically than we can on the regulatory side,” he said.

“There is no point us developing remote-controlled ships if there isn’t a market to sell them into.”

Mr Levander said the time was right to have the debate as the public’s imagination had been piqued by recent developments, such as Google’s acquisition of a supplier ofrobots to the military or its driverless car project and the promise by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, that unmanned aerial drones could start delivering packages within five years.

“It is happening in all the other industries so it is only logical that it should happen in marine,” he said.

But attempts by Rolls-Royce, better known as an aero-engine builder, to start a debate were met with some scepticism by shipowners. “I’m not very much of a fan and think this is a long way off,” said Peter Hinchliffe, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping.

Beyond the savings from not having to pay a crew to run the ship, an unmanned vessel could potentially be lighter and have more space for cargo as marine architects could dispense with the bridge and life-support systems.

The European Commission is already funding an independent study to look at the feasibility of operating a conventional ship without crew on the high seas. The project, dubbed Munin, envisages a vessel sailing autonomously until it gets close to harbour at which point a crew would be put onboard.