China Develops High-Speed Intelligent Unmanned Sea Vessel | Hacker News Reader

China Develops High-Speed Intelligent Unmanned Sea Vessel

defense-aerospace.com

17 pointsprostoalex7 comments

Unmanned vessels currently cannot operate legally in international waters, as they do not meet the minimum crew requirements.

Also, with no crew aboard, the registered owner of the vessel will be on the hook to pay for any salvage operation that may be required to mitigate environmental damage or damage to the vessel. Also, tech-savvy pirates may find an un-crewed vessel to be easy pickings, with no one around to prevent boarding, disconnect of remote control, and disabling of tracking devices.

The technical challenges of making it possible are only the first obstacles to making it economically viable. Being able to enter ports and get maritime insurance is critical.

But if the kinks can be smoothed out, unmanned ship technology will almost certainly be moving goods from Shanghai to Long Beach soon after. Otherwise, only military groups will bother trying.

It's only 10 meters long, it'd have a tough time going out of coastal waters no matter what. (Unless it's very resistant to being flipped or swamped, which I suppose is possible.)

wouldn't an unmanned submersible make more sense?

why bother being above the water if there are no crew on board to breathe air, anyway?

it seems like a submersible would be ideal for certain military applications, patrolling, or whatever else you'd use a robot boat for.

also, I'd bet drug smugglers would really appreciate getting their hands on an unmanned submersible.

Maybe they're working on one. You gotta walk before you run.

A submarine would have to be very autonomous, though. Getting a high-bandwidth signal to it for real-time control (without it surfacing) would be a huge challenge. A surface ship can just use old-fashioned radio.

Being unmanned, even if it was flipped or swamped, it might be able to recover and re-establish the remote control channel.

A wine cork can cross the ocean. If you filled all voids in an unmanned boat with expanded polystyrene, it would be assuredly unsinkable, unless you physically tore the hull to pieces.

It appears to be a catamaran or SWATH craft. The developer is supposedly 'Sifang', which another article[0] expands to 'Beijing Sifang Automation'.[1] Other points from the article:

The project commenced in 2014, according to Guo Tianyu, one of the company’s key account managers

A first prototype of the SeaFly completed phase one tests on Nanhu Lake in Wuhan on 27 October. The system, dubbed SeaFly-01, measures 10.25m long and can achieve a speed of 45km/h via two diesel engines.

The SeaFly will displace 4.5t and has an endurance of 400+km. The carbon fibre hull employs a ‘double-M’ configuration for speed and stability, and it can operate in up to Sea State 4 in all types of weather.

A monitoring centre can transmit commands to the USV at distances of up to 50km. However, the USV is capable of totally autonomous operations, plus it is able to learn autonomously.

Its core equipment was all developed within China and it operates using the Beidou navigation system

stealthy low radar cross-section

[0] https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/uv-online/zhuhai-2016-sea...

[1] http://www.sifang-electric.com/index.php/en/ and http://www.sf-auto.com/Pages/default.aspx

so, it's a weaponized drone boat with sophisticated autopilot? I can't imagine the combination of "light weapons" and "totally autonomous" being deployed in the real world, today...

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