Rolls-Royce Drone Ships Challenge $375B Freight Industry
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
There is merit in what they say about safety, but they see it not as a set of problems that might be overcome, but as a way of shutting down the conversation. They don't want to think about how easily a significant part of what they do could be automated or eliminated.
The heuristic is not that they object, it is that they don't want to discuss, even as speculation.
It's interesting that one place these objections haven't come up is air travel. Because if you think about it, air travel should be a place we fear to automated, but we already did it. Autopilot sort of sneaked in before people realized what automation was, and pilots are comfortable that they still have a place alongside the machines, so they are happy to talk, and explain as slowly as necessary that automated landing might be a good idea one day, but automating a crash landing wouldn't work out well.
The way this usually seems to work out is, everyone says it's impossible, until someone does it, and eats the other players alive. The most interesting thing here is that the insurers are the barrier. When drone designs are up and running, there will be a niche for an insurer that will take the risk, and in these days of crowd funding, you wouldn't need to be an entrenched player to take it.
The Maersk's Triple E class ships, for example, are less powerful than the previous generation of ships.
The next disruption is likely the New Panamax will allow ships with up to 13,000 TEU through the Panama Canal, rather than the old limit of about 5,000.
This disruption, and the creation of the Panama and Suez canals, are counter-examples to your idea that people "don't want to discuss, even as speculation" disruptive ideas. Some don't - the British didn't want the competition to their India trade - but certainly many, including Napolean, wanted a Suez canal.
> The heuristic is not that they object, it is that they don't want to discuss, even as speculation.
What if I proposed a nuclear powered aircraft. There are obvious advantages, like unlimited range. Airports wouldn't need the fueling infrastructure, so flights to, say, Easter Island wouldn't have to also pay to get the jet fuel there for the return flight. Ground crew could smoke. It would be highly disruptive, yes?
Of course, there will be people who dismiss it right away. "The reactor and shielding will be too heavy", "there's too much risk in case of accident", "the R&D costs are too high", and so on. Most don't even want to discuss what nuclear powered air travel could do, even as speculation. Each one could shut down the conversation.
By your heuristic, airplane power production is an undisrupted industry.
While the reality is that those objections are absolutely true, and are some of the reasons why we don't have atomic aircraft.
This means your heuristic is wrong, or at least incomplete.
Some ideas are disruptive .. but either physically impossible or economically nonviable.
How do you judge if this ides isn't in one of those two categories? You presume that drone designs will be up and running at some point. What if that point is 100 years in the future? Why should people now be concerned with it?
Perhaps the boats could transfer cargo to and from manned boats in international waters to get around local regulations, or even just bring people on board the ship.
For instance, With no humans aboard you could have a ship that is super slow and super energy efficient, it could cast itself out into currents, use a variety of novel locomotive methods in a significantly longer but cheaper journey. With no people aboard to pay, feed, etc, it wouldn’t matter how long it took.
While this is one novel scenario, which probably wouldn’t work for a million reasons, there are probably a hundred more ideas that would work for a automated ship that are currently unfeasible.
Yes, it would, because it would limit the number of times you can turn over your assets, as more of your assets will be locked up in goods in transit at any time, and no bank will offer you free credit for 100% of its value, so there's a real monetary cost to slower delivery. Of course that doesn't mean that slower delivery can't be a benefit, but there will be a cutoff point where it starts to cost more than you save.
As these factors change during the journey, the tanker adjusts its speed on an hour-by-hour basis.
"Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines" (2)
The very large and very slow rotating diesel engines used to power ships are incredibly efficient. Oil tankers run very slowly, gas a little faster, then bulk carriers, container ships (time value of those containers is higher than commodity oil and bulk, so they move) and fastest and least efficient of all are cruise ships. The size of some of those engines is fantastic.
It's really nerdy and awesome.
(1) http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Books/Personal/Prime-Movers-of-... (2) http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Movers-Globalization-History-Tur...
For an illustration of how dramatic this can be, consider that a major factor of Apples success, for example, is that their inventory turnover has skyrocketed - to more than 60 times a year as of 2012, compared to ~36 times a year for Dell (inventory turnover was one of the things Dell used to be famous for) or about 15 times a year for RIM.
In other words in 2012, for every $1m of capital locked up in in inventory at any one time, if Apple had 10% margin before considering capital costs for the inventory, they'd make $100k per turnover, for $6m, while RIM would have made $1.5m.
That capital is not free - you're either facing borrowing costs or inability to invest it elsewhere.
(of course the shipping is clearly not the only thing affecting inventory turnover)
> Perhaps investors could buy the goods (or make a loan) after they leave the shore, sell them when they get back, and pocket the difference.
Banks have had revolving credit facilities to handle this kind of thing pretty much as long as banks have existed. This changes the numbers but not the overall principle.
To be clear: It is likely that there can be savings to make this way - I'm not disputing that.
E.g. there's already at least one cargo ship that uses a kite to save fuel costs by relying on wind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails ). Clearly that's one thing that might make it profitable to making smart decisions about routes that maximize fuel savings even if that may slow down the delivery.
My point is just that it isn't sufficient to look at the savings for a single shipment - you also need to consider that the shipment will tie up substantial capital, and that has a cost per day too, whether in credit costs or in reduced ability to turn over inventory, and that will create very real limitations on how much you can slow down ships and still see benefits.
Or what about fish farming that works more like cattle grazing: a boat that moves a net of fish around to searching for food and nutrients before returning to land for harvest.
A lot of crazy possibilities about the future.
Sounds crazy, but this has sort of been proposed with seasteading. Taking boats or building in international waters so they don't have to deal with local regulations. For example there was a boat off the coast of California where immigrants could go to work until they could get into the US legally. Or boats that perform abortions outside of places where they are illegal. It's not so much of a stretch that this could be done for manufacturing.
BTW, I feel this is one of those "why didn't anyone think of this before" situations. Hundreds of thousands of people in the maritime industry, and I bet this was totally off their radar (pun intended). It is still far-fetched, but now that someone has researched the details, it feels possible. I especially like the idea of more tech and comms jobs replacing difficult and dangerous work.
If you're interested in following the various maritime industries, gcaptain.com is a good website. They cover many aspects (shipping, drilling, ports, finance, insurance, piracy, wrecks, and rescues), and usually have great photos.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/business/worldbusiness/15i...
What this unmanned slow boat would be good for would be trash pickup, something that's not really economical now but is nevertheless a real problem, especially int he pacific.
Sailing ships of the 1890s were very cost effective. They still were made outmoded by the reliability of steam ships.
The cost of the crew really isn't that big an impediment. The cost of cargo sitting around is much, much larger.
With no way to stop the ship, and likely no way to easily get off, the pirates would just be passengers until the ship reached the final destination.
Most of the threat of piracy relates to the crew, not the cargo. It's not like they are lifting containers off ships or emptying oil tankers into their pirate refineries.
They can't move the ship anywhere, they would be noticed by onboard cameras and would be reachable by both boats and choppers, so at they have an hour or two to fill their boats with stuff, drive them to the shore and abandon the boats there in order to have a chance in getting away.
Robbing freight trucks at gunpoint seems like a safer and more profitable business than that.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420071/Husband-wife...
Besides the ethics of whether to treat pirates as criminals or not, you can't automatically assume anyone moving on board is a pirate; they could also be in need of rescue. Ships are supposed to render aid to distressed travelers on the high seas, AFAIK.
Big waves can reach the deck, causing water motion. (Eg, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5qf_ATRDk0 )
Big waves can cause the ship to flex, causing internal motion. (Eg, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Mw6L69b6Y ).
Where do the drones go in case of storm or breakdown? To the ship? If so, that's more motion on board.
The Coast Guard and the Navy like to board ships in order to carry out an inspection.
-I think it's possible. It might also be viable to have a mix of a few manned ships (cargo or otherwise) leading a group of drone ships.
-We, as humans, need to get used to the fact that machines are going to become better (not to mention cheaper) than us at almost every task we now classify as human only.
-And this makes me envision a time in the future where Somali pirates use computers instead of guns to take over ships.
My first thought, although probably not actual Somali's.
I imagine the ships going through dangerous territory would probably have some sort of defense, if not munitions, then sound, laser, or other type. It's also not crazy to imagine that the ships would have flying drones on them for reconnaissance and other uses.
Ships could be instructed to accept orders under very strict rules, perhaps even ignoring orders while operating in certain regions. Given full ability to understand their surroundings they could avoid collisions with anything that would seriously damage their hulls and ignore most smaller vessels that are acting in obvious means to try an intercept them. Plus with no crew on board you do not need to provide easy access to anything, just seal it.
I am more interested in driver less big rigs and trains. I figure that planes and ships are more heavily protected by union organizations.
Well, there's always the teamsters[1] to consider.
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_Te...
I agree with you and forecast that big rigs and trains will eventually be automated as well. Energy companies are already using autonomous dump trucks in Canada. [ http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/autonomous-dump-trucks-are-... ]
Maybe Nigerian's?
The article says, "Unmanned ships would also reduce risks such as piracy, since there would be no hostages to capture ..."
But much piracy, for example in the eastern Indian Ocean, is after cargo, not hostages. Pirates could disable the propulsion system of, then loot, a robot cargo ship in the far reaches of the Indian Ocean where governmental controls are much weaker than elsewhere.
Pirates may be able to approach the ship, but entering is a different story.
Cutting a hole in the side of the ship would be the only option I could see.
Same goes for disabling the propulsion system. If there's no cockpit, there's no switch to disable anything.
Have you seen a container ship? The containers are stacked out in the open. There's no need to have a door because there aren't any walls in the way.
Cut the antennas, block the GPS signal, and what's the ship supposed to do besides stop?
As for blocking the GPS signal, again, you need to know where the GPS is hiding. It could be trailing 100ft behind the boat for all the pirate knows.
On Tuesday November 3, a special Israel Navy force intercepted and boarded the cargo ship "Francop". Some 500 tons of weapons, rockets, and missiles were uncovered aboard the vessel, disguised as civilian cargo and hidden among hundreds of other containers. - http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/Terrorism/Palestinian/Pa...
Greece intercepts mystery ship with 20,000 Kalashnikovs onboard - http://rt.com/news/greek-seize-ship-kalashnikov-503/
The Israeli navy released Monday afternoon the HMS Beethoven, a Liberian-flagged German vessel it apprehended 160 miles off the Israeli coast, on Sunday afternoon, on suspicion that it was carrying weapons headed to Gaza. Thorough overnight inspections of the cargo turned up nothing problematic, and the troops let the ship continue on its way. - http://www.timesofisrael.com/navy-releases-liberian-cargo-sh...
In January the amphibious transport USS San Antonio stopped a Russian-owned cargo ship, the Monchegorsk, in the Red Sea. US intelligence had received a tip that the freighter was carrying weapons exports from Iran – a violation of United Nations sanctions. A US Navy boarding party confirmed the presence of arms. ... As this incident shows, the US Navy and allies have ample experience at interdicting suspect vessels on the high seas. - http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2009/0624/p02s04-usmi....
So you are right, these are not "just to have a look around." They are being stopped for a reason. Also, these couldn't wait until the ship got into port. In the first case, the ship might have had a nuclear bomb.
And I think the coast guards and navies want to continue to be able to stop ships at sea in the future and inspect cargo.
Also, the GPS wouldn't be 100ft behind the ship. The antenna needs to be above the surface, which means there would need to be a (visible) cable pull it along, and there would be an extra wake.
Lack of crew will greatly simplify the implementation as it can be trained to fire on all humans without concern for friendly fire.
Current maritime law doesn't allow for robot defense systems with lethal force.
Consider too what happens if the Coast Guard wants to interdict but the distant operators "accidentally" forget to disable the defense system.
The maximum gross mass for a TEU is 24,000 kg. The volume is 38.5 cubic meters => density of 623 kg/cubic meter.
The density of sea water is about 1020 kg/cubic meter. Thus, to be neutrally buoyant, each TEU needs a countermass of at least 397 kg/cubic meter, or 15 tons.
A 5,000 TEU would have to lug around some 76,000 tonnes in the best of cases.
This could be handled with water, but that implies very large tanks (about equal to the amount of cargo), which greatly reduces the amount of cargo space available.
This is why merchant subs are only really appropriate for dense cargoes (like metals) or for very expensive cargoes (like chemical dyes, medical drugs, and mail; or cocaine for narco-submarines). Even then, it's only economically justifiable in order to run a blockade or bypass an ice sheet.
D'oh! Of course it can't.
If that were feasible, shipping companies would have done it already. As to piracy, a robot ship represents an added risk, not a reduced one. Just look at Internet crime and compare it with old-style bank robberies to see my point -- those who robbed Mt. Gox didn't have to risk a face-to-face confrontation with an armed guard. It's the same here.
> I'm not saying it'd be easy, but it's not the showstopper you make it out to be.
I'll bet that's what the backers of Bitcoin said -- until a week ago.
For shipping companies, it's not about feasibility. It's about profits. Thanks to insurance, they can afford to pay a ransom every now-and-then and therefore don't need to make the ships as secure as profits. Having no crew onboard would lower operating costs, leaving them with more money to spend on anti-piracy measures. And even then, they would only do it if the cost of adding said measures is less than the cost of insurance.
> Just look at Internet crime and compare it with old-style bank robberies to see my point
That's not really a fair comparison, is it. Bank robbers aren't after ransoms, and neither are the guys who robbed MtGox.
> That's not really a fair comparison, is it.
As a matter of fact, yes, it is.
> Bank robbers aren't after ransoms, and neither are the guys who robbed MtGox.
It's all about stealing other people's money. You're trying to say that the method one chooses to steal other people's money is more than a detail.
No, I don't think so, but the risks inherent in virtual currencies should now be obvious to everyone.
Bitcoin may recover, but I think in the long term, much better software and transaction protocols will be required than now exist. Remember also that Mt. Gox wasn't the only large online Bitcoin theft:
http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitc...
Besides, take some of the money saved on salaries and use it for foreign aid to countries such as Somalia and you'd have stopped piracy before you know it.
No, that certainly won't work. With all respect, it's naive to think that foreign aid can solve the problem of poverty. In many cases it makes the problem worse.
Consider the Diem regime in the early 1960s, South Vietnam. Copious American aid made the prior situation much worse, led to large amounts of corruption, and in part contributed to the eventual fall of South Vietnam.
Look at foreign aid programs that don't also address political and social issues like basic human rights and reproductive choice for women. They always fail, and many make the original problems worse.
In seriousness though, I don't think your link disagrees with lutusp's comment. The Gates Foundation seems to care about human rights and reproductive choice, the lack of which causes aid to fail (as claimed by the parent comment). In other words, I think lutusp is saying that dumping money into an impoverished environment will lead to corruption and more poverty, but more involved approaches that directly liberate the people can work.
I think the parent should probably have said 'direct government-to-government foreign aid usually makes things worse'.
Part of the thing Bill Gates is fighting against with his 'myth busting' is the bad reputation foreign aid has got because it goes directly from politician to politician, and not necessarily distributed or managed in accordance with what people know to work.
During my around-the-world solo sail (http://arachnoid.com/sailbook), I saw and heard any number of pirate stories. For example, in the Strait of Malacca, pirates will show up after dark in two wooden boats (no radar signature) with a rope slung between them. They stretch the rope across the bow of a passing freighter, which puts a wooden boat on each side of the ship, dragged along with it. Then they climb aboard, break the seals of some cargo containers, steal some electronics or something else easy to to carry off, climb back down into their boats and release the rope.
Perfectly simple, low-tech, and because of the small size of modern cargo ship crews, likely to escape the attention of the crew.
> I heard any number of accounts of cargo vessels being boarded by pirates late at night, to steal cargo and slip away undetected by the skeleton crew that shipping operators prefer.
If the ship filled with poison gas manages to avoid the pirates it'll have a tougher time avoiding Greenpeace activists...
* A modern cargo ship isn't a rigid, airtight vessel, it's somewhat flexible and certainly not airtight above the waterline.
* Also, the cargo on a modern cargo ship isn't inside the ship as in the old "On the Waterfront" days when unskilled laborers loaded and unloaded ships, it's all out on the deck in the form of cargo containers:
http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0...
You're not thinking this through. The reason pirates can board ships with relative safety is because the operators have realized that if they arm the crews, the pirates will simply kill everyone on board as a precaution. So a decision was made to avoid too much a show of force, because that would only invite retaliation in kind.
After a ship has been taken over, that's different -- that's the time for a show of force, but training and arming cargo vessel crews as part-time soldiers was obviously a bad idea.
You seem to recognize that force (and I assume you mean potentially deadly force) should be used against pirates, which is also my view. Dethstar claims that some people dispute this view.
But that's true, and it's not based on humanitarian grounds, but pragmatic ones -- if we arm the crews of cargo ships and adopt a policy of killing people who try to board on the high seas, the pirates will simply shoot back sooner, board by force, and kill the crew as a precaution.
I speak as someone who had an armed standoff with pirates in the Indian Ocean, far from land, during my around-the-world sail (http://arachnoid.com/sailbook). As the pirates came alongside I didn't shoot, I only showed my gun, and the pirates had to decide whether they wanted to try to board a boat under gunfire. If I had started shooting instead, that would have invited instant retaliation from the armed pirates and I would have lost.
A small example but a relevant one.
That's a very different belief than the one mentioned by dethstar. Dethstar was referring to killing pirates with poison gas on an unmanned ship, so as far as I can tell it's a moral or humanitarian belief. Your belief is pragmatic, but it wouldn't apply to unmanned ships where there is no crew to be in danger.
Piracy would have to become incredibly frequent and highly sophisticated to make a noticeable dent in the financials of the shipping industry. There are limits to what pirates can offload and carry home due to the necessity of using fast and/or stealthy ships.
The crews on cargo ships are there to operate the ship, not protect the cargo.
Or are they just there to fill minimum crew size regulations and babysit ships that mostly drive themselves anyways?
Unfortunately some times the sensors or actuators break, so an engineer will have to do some manual work. I suspect older engineers are more likely to do this, because they still think their own intuition is better than some algorithm (case in point: see quote in article from the union representative).
As for maintenance, it gets done in port. There are times, however, when things break horribly, and the engineers have to fix it themselves while at sea or find a work-around. With a drone fleet, one way to deal with this may be to have engineering teams on stand-by, ready to helo to a broken drone ship and do repairs.
If the ships travelled in groups of 3+ then in the event of a failure the other two ships could tow the failed ship? Is this feasible? I honestly have no idea.
Very few helicopters have a range >600 nm one-way. That puts a lot of places a ship could be in the shipping lanes well out of range.
But most of the rest of the time is spent doing maintenance. The ocean is a very harsh environment and things are always breaking/needing attention due to constant motion and corrosive salt air.
I don't know that there would be an overall savings since if routine maintenance isn't being done underway, while the ship is making money, then it has to be done in port when it's not. So now you have a long period when your expensive asset isn't turning a profit. I haven't been in the industry in a long time, but I was taught that the second highest operating cost of a ship at sea was wages (fuel is first). As a result, ships are essentially understaffed to keep those costs down. I had to laugh at his "quality of life" comment. When has any shipowner cared about his crew's quality of life? These are people who literally fall asleep on their feet from exhaustion.
I wonder what the payback period will be. You're removing the salary cost, but replacing it with more automation that has to be extremely high reliability due to the environment and distances traveled.
How? A driver-less truck pulls up to the front of a corner store. Then what? Someone still has to take the (correct) product from the truck, load it on a hand cart, take it into each shop and put it on the shelves. Normally this is the driver of the truck, but if you automate him away then every shop-keep need a guy hanging around to unload the auto-delivery trucks all day or take time away from serving customers to do it themselves.
That is not a clear net win to me. It is a physical manifestation of automated phone support. Cheaper to implement by the company but more time consuming and less useful for the users and less efficient overall...
Other items were ordered from a wholesale distributer. Those were delivered by truck to the loading dock in cardboard boxes. We moved those into the store, unpacked the boxes, and filled the shelves.
Beer and such was put into the walk-in by the driver, and we stocked the coolers as needed.
It will be a long time before the local ice distributer goes automatic (for economic reasons it makes sense to make and distribute ice very locally). But wholesale distributers? I can see a truck with a lift gate and some kind of robot to automatically unload the truck. We always had to be there to receive anyway, except it was a human with a dolly moving the boxes into the bay.
The manufacturer/distributor sets the price and the grocer could care less whether any sells at all, as long as they find a way to keep getting foot traffic.
I wish that was available on consumer sailing boats. There are lots of hazards for small vessels out there. And to be honest, lately big ships are one of them. No crew is actually watching anything other, but the radar & AIS, hence small boats can be destroyed and never found again.
As per piloting - the first crude autopilots were made in 1970s...
OTOH, compare that to Oakland to Osaka (to pull two cities out of the air) and a trip taking around two weeks. What level of reliability do you need to have to ensure that nothing important breaks? Does this impose an additional cost that's less than the savings of having no crew.
It's an interesting idea that I'm sure will eventually happen but I'm wondering if it's really ready for prime time.
with humans: we must rescue them whatever it takes!
without humans: oh well, cost of doing business.
Drones have an acceptable failure rate.
Now it is a matter of climbing on board and breaking the locks. (And no I don't think automated guns will be an acceptable solution. I can't see the NY port Authotirty being happy about armed computers sliding into view.
(Why am I thinking of the Matrix cartoon / prequels now?)
Not really. The standard procedure to "repel boarders" is to:
1. Try to outmaneuver the pirate boat. 2. If that fails, point and blast fire hoses at pirates.
Crews don't [usually] carry firearms because of insurance liabilities. If there's no crew on board, then more robust defense mechanisms can be used.
Finally, depending on the cargo and location, I would imagine selling off the cargo would be a simple matter.
The ship itself is often the drop location for ransoms; piracy doesn't generally require hiding the ship.
> Also, without hostages, using armed forces to take the ship back would probably be a lot easier.
This is a significant point.
In any case, it seems ships already use sonic weapons against assailants, maybe those could be remote controlled.
Or just disable propulsion and then tow the ship. They'll probably figure out some cheap ways like "throw a fishing net into the turbine".
Negativity aside, this looks like the future I hope that consumer grade cars/transportation will eventually have this. I can imagine a highway of the future with a lane for autonomous vehicles instead of truck drivers.
Heck most airplanes fly themselves.
The unmanned option is better in case of piracy, since due to lack of hostages there is less pressure for ransom and it's safer to re-capture the ship before it can be delivered to a pirate friendly port.
The real vulnerability of unmanned ship is against small-scale theft (a rubber dinghy boarding, opening a container and stealing a few TVs), but for large cargo ships thieves can do the same without the crew noticing; so it can be covered by insurance probably.
I believe the pirates are in it for the insurance money for the hostages anyway I doubt they want to fence any actual goods.
With no human operable "helm" there is no way to divert the ship, short of posessing an engine more powerful than the ship's engine, and no crew to hold hostage. Potentially some containers could be opened and looted, but the practical amount of looting is a fraction of one container.
The real objections should be about failure modes of ships and what a crew can to to mitigate them. But even this angle is susceptible to the possibility that the safest crew and ship is an un-crewed ship. If you are not on the ship, you can't cause an accident, and you won't die in an accident.
Because engines are impossible to disable, GPS is impossible to spoof, and control systems are impossible to hack even with unlimited physical access.
> no crew to hold hostage
There's a fancy robotic ship and a bunch of cargo to hold hostage.
> the practical amount of looting is a fraction of one container
How do you reckon? I suppose if the value-density of the cargo were low enough then nobody would have incentive to steal it, so they would have to threaten to destroy it instead.
> The real objections should be about failure modes of ships and what a crew can to to mitigate them.
You're absolutely right. But piracy is one of those failure modes.
If you make the technical demands on a successful hijacking higher, I expect these numbers to fall.
I also expect self-driving trucks to sharply cut theft, rather than enable it.
They feel like the easiest thing to rob on any low-traffic road - you need two people in masks, one walks in the middle of the road in front of the truck so it stops in order to avoid "traffic accident", the second one takes whatever he wants from the back, and both leave through a side path too narrow for the truck to follow. Even if you get a cop car there within 10 minutes, all you've got is a video without faces.
What proportion of loss do you think comes from robberies as opposed to theft when the barrier is reduced to finding an unguarded stationary vehicle? My guess is that robberies makes up a tiny proportion, and that they'd continue to be rare because of the perceived barrier of having to stop the vehicle.
1. It would be harder and less safe to force him to stop the truck - drivers expecting a robbery sometimes don't stop in dangerous situations but attempt ramming the robber or running away at some risk; an automated car would be much more passive since the liabilities for running over a pedestrian are of a much higher priority.
2. For a manned truck to be robbed that way it would generally need to be an armed robbery, and at least in Europe most thieves don't have any easy access to guns;
3. If you get caught, you have a chance to get away from charges - it isn't a crime as such to walk in front of a truck, and the prosecution may fail to prove your connection to whoever actually takes the stuff;
4. This may be done also by young teens/preteens who are almost immune to criminal charges even if they get caught; currently they are limited mostly to shoplifting, but this would be within their abilities.
[1] http://www.e-navigation.net/index.php?page=resilient-pnt-fro...
The efficiency and pollution problem with cargo ships can't be fixed with more crgo ships. That's just insane. Build a dedicated high-speed nuclear, wind and solar powered high speed cargo train connecting the US coasts and the gulf. This alone would eliminate some ten thousand cargo ships per year making the trek through the Panama Canal. During this trek they burn over a million dollars of bunker fuel, the nastiest most polluting fuel you can burn.
Methinks this is just one of those "let's burn government money 'cause they don't know any better" scams. Not the first time.
"By replacing the bridge -- along with the other systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning, water and sewage..."
It's not just eliminating people. It's eliminating the whole bridge, and adding more cargo. And the 12 to 15 percent number might be a "fuel per unit of cargo" number, not necessarily "total fuel per boat".
"Build a dedicated high-speed nuclear, wind and solar powered high speed cargo train connecting the US coasts and the gulf" Who do you propose pays for this, the government which "don't now any better"? Private companies? If this was actually cheaper than burning a million dollars of fuel, they would have done it already. And I doubt trains could carry nearly as much cargo as a large cargo ship.
Of course I did. And I am disputing these numbers.
The Maersk triple e class cargo ships can carry 18,000 containers. There is no way removing crew quarters will make room for another 1,800. For one thing, even an autonomous ship must have the ability to be crewed from onboard due to safety/emergency considerations. It's a pipe dream, a stunt, just like Amazon delivering packages in a busy city using drones.
The hydrodynamic drag of these ships by far overwhelms the cost equation. The only way you are going to save 10% is by slowing down. And you can do that just fine with a crew. In fact, this is precisely what they do to control costs. I did extensive research on this topic about three years ago. If I remember correctly, the trip from Shaghai to Europe through the Suez canal takes approximately 32 days. When fuel costs spiked cargo ships slowed down to make the same trip in sixty days in order to control costs.
I could be wrong, of course. Based on what i know I just don't see how automation could make such an impact. The 800 pound gorilla isn't the crew quarters, it's physics.
This whole idea of slowing down the ships doesn't work because there's an asymptotic function attached to that idea. You can't wait half a year for 20,000 containers to get from China to Europe or the US. Business can't be conducted effectively when delivery times start getting ridiculous. Sixty days from China to Europe was horribly painful and it hurt business and economies in multiple ways.
Again, I could be wrong. I'd like to read more. From my current vantage point this is as viable an idea as delivering books in Manhattan using drones.
http://www.hsh-nordbank.com/media/en/pdf/kundenbereiche/schi... says that crew costs for a Post-Panamax I are US$3,712/day. Total operational costs are US$8,754/day . This excludes fuel.
Slow-steaming for the same vessel is about 60 tons per day. http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_co...
http://www.bunkerworld.com/prices/ lists prices of around US$600/ton => $36,000 of fuel per day.
Assuming the New Panamax toll is similar to the 2011 toll of $72/TEU listed at https://www.pancanal.com/eng/op/tolls.html gives about $400,000 for a crossing. This corresponds to 10 days of sailing. Note that there's another day for transit.
To double check, the Panama Canal saves about 13,000 km of travel. Slow steaming is about 35 km/hour, or about 15 days of sailing. Thus, for the cost of 11 days of sailing one can save 14 days, making the Panama Canal fee entirely reasonable.
The activity is also esoteric enough that it would not be ridiculous to demand that the participants pay for their own safety net.
It's possible to do a cost-benefit analysis, but it's not meaningful if it only takes into account adventure yachtists.
What about fishing boats which have been hit by freighters (as in http://gcaptain.com/dutch-freighter-sinks-french-trawler/ )? Do the owners of uncrewed freighters have no culpability or responsibility in helping contribute towards a safety net even though the freighter might be the cause of a problem?
Freighters themselves also have problems at sea. Eg, http://worldmaritimenews.com/archives/68327/vietnamese-freig... concerns a freighter where 18 of the crew were rescued by another freighter, the Pacific Skipper.
Here's a case where a cargo ship hit a ferry - http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/18/world/asia/philippines-shi... . The crew of the cargo ship, plus the navy, Coast Guard and other commercial vessels, worked to rescue some of the passengers. If commercial vessels were uncrewed then that's fewer ships that could have helped.
It's also vastly fewer ships that could end up in trouble with crews that will need to be rescued.
Second, you don't know what you are talking about, because there's no way to get "vastly fewer ships".
There are some four million fishing vessels, of which 1.3 million are decked and about 40,000 of them are longer than 24 meters (over 100 tons). These are not going to be uncrewed because we haven't automated fishing.
According to the CIA factbook at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... there are 16,406 vessels in the world's merchant marine. Of those, over 1,722 (I stopped counting at Norway) are passenger or passenger/cargo ships which cannot be uncrewed.
Removing the crew from the 14,000 remaining ships is not going to "vastly" reduce the number of ships with crews that will need to be rescued. It will, on the other hand vastly reduce the number of ships with the capacity to help in an offshore rescue. (A commercial troll vessel with a crew of 4 doesn't have the extra safety equipment that a, say, Handymax bulk carrier carries, and can't handle the same weather conditions.)
>Crew costs of $3,299 a day account for about 44 percent of total operating expenses for a large container ship, according to Moore Stephens LLP, an industry accountant and consultant.
That would be what, 10 days at sea? Are they really that fast? Even if so, where does 44% come from?
http://www.hsh-nordbank.com/media/en/pdf/kundenbereiche/schi...
It lists a median cost of US$3,712/day for manning costs, with a total operating cost of $8,138/day => 45.6% .
Sure, waste from crew activities is part of the output, but most of it could be recycled or composted. The big source of pollution is the diesel engines, and those wouldn't change much.
And faster? Whatever weight savings came from removing crew accommodations would just be used to fit more TEUs for the trip.
Edit: According to the quote [1], it seems like the engines wouldn't necessarily be more efficient but rather more cargo per ship increasing the shipment to fuel ratio. Somewhat similar to CSX's fuel saving slogan "Trains can move a ton of freight nearly 450 miles on a single gallon of fuel." [2].
[1] - "By replacing the bridge -- along with the other systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning, water and sewage -- with more cargo, ships can cut costs and boost revenue, Levander said. The ships would be 5 percent lighter before loading cargo and would burn 12 percent to 15 percent less fuel, he said."
[2] - http://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-csx/projects-and-partners...
And what's to say the amount of cargo carried wouldn't simply be increased by 5 percent or so, offsetting any gains?
"Pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with more than $100 million worth of crude oil off the coast of Kenya, seizing the largest ship ever hijacked"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/world/africa/18pirates.htm...
Hell, you could go a step further and equip each one with it's own drone to defend itself in case of attack.
If it were so, wouldn't such systems be already installed on manned boats? There's nothing here that is tied to the boat's capability of self-steering.
why would a drone ship have any human navigable rigging? drones do not have cockpits, life support systems, etc. a drone ship would have cargo containers all around, no bridge, no control room, etc.
how do you board something that has no surface meant for humans?
I just hope they can still find and pickup Tom Hanks and Wilson.