However, Levander admits there are several key challenges that remain to be solved with unmanned shipping. Although piracy concerns may be abated, the improvement of IT security is a priority. The reliability and redundancy of machinery onboard ships also needs to be increased. “The progress will be step-by-step: first more remote monitoring, slowly going to controlling those machines onshore, then the same with navigation, all the time reducing person-by-person with automatic systems,” he says.
“You can fix a small thing if something happens, as when engineers used to travel on airlines. With unmanned ships, if something happens, you need a duplicate system. The industry’s mentality is that there always has to be crew present to do the small things on board, and that has to change. We need more standardisation, across whole systems,” he says.
Commercial shipping isn’t the only area of the marine sector working hard at autonomous technology. There are also clear benefits for the use of autonomous systems in defence and search and rescue. Earlier this year the Ministry of Defence announced £9 million of funding to research autonomous marine systems.
The money will sponsor research into areas including underwater autonomous vehicles, the tracking of dynamic maritime features, and the development of sensor systems, electronics and software. Potential applications include the clearance of mines and persistent wide-area surveillance.
The Royal Navy has been testing two automated underwater mine detection drones at Portsmouth. The torpedo drones are launched from a motor launch to scan the seabed. After several hours the drones return to their mother ships, where the data is downloaded and analysed.
Philip Smith, affordable maritime presence programme manager at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, says: “The opportunities presented by maritime autonomous systems are exciting. However if we are to fully exploit these opportunities we need to invest in key areas such as supervised autonomy and deployment and recovery to meet future requirements. The funding we are making available through these initiatives is a significant step towards achieving this.”
Marine robot: Engineers are adapting vessels to operate autonomously
As Royal Navy engineers test mine detectors in the UK, elsewhere in Europe a robotic search and rescue project has reached a significant milestone. The Icarus (Integrated Components for Assisted Rescue and Unmanned Search) project started in 2012. The
£17.5 million project runs until the end of 2016 and involves 24 partners. It aims to develop autonomous ‘crisis management robots’ for use in the air, on land and at sea, which will be first to attend the scene of an incident to gather data and, in some cases, act on it.
Researchers working in the marine section of Icarus successfully conducted sea trials for the floating and flying robots in October. The tests integrated air and marine vehicles at a level not achieved before. The trials also represented the first time multiple robots had been controlled by one person from the same control unit.
One of the primary aims of Icarus is to increase the level of autonomy in unmanned systems, to reduce the workload on the operators. A system like that tested in October would normally require five operators. The aim is to reduce this to one operator of multiple robots.
For the marine vehicles, researchers used a remotely controlled scout vessel, originally designed for military use. This vessel was equipped with sensors for obstacle avoidance, cameras to find survivors, and radar for directional movement. The vehicle follows a preprogrammed route or covers an area autonomously.
Eye in the sky: lcarus uses UAVs to search and direct unmanned boats
In the air, the system consists of a large unmanned aerial vehicle with cameras, sensors and communications equipment that provides a situational overview and directs the other vehicles, including a smaller UAV for searching.
A survival lifeboat, which could accommodate up to eight survivors, is being developed. The control unit will be portable enough to be operated onshore or on a vessel. The nature and scale of the deployment will depend on the incident. Stefano Fioravanti, the scientist in charge of the Icarus project from the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation in Italy, says the main benefit is a reduction of the risk to human life at sea. Manned helicopters do not fly at night for marine search and rescue, but an unmanned search and rescue system could be used at night and during bad weather.
Marine incidents are also more often spread over a large area and survivors can be dispersed widely around it. With the unmanned system, more vehicles could be used and deployed faster. If a vehicle loses communication, the robot can also keep operating until it is re-established.
“Our task is to give the sensors and the processes intelligence, and to increase the level of autonomy in the unmanned system,” he says. “But there should always be a human operator in the loop, monitoring positions and taking decisions.”
Like Levander from Rolls-Royce, Fioravanti sees the greatest barrier as regulatory. “Under current laws, an unmanned surface vessel cannot operate without a person onboard,” he says. “If we don’t have the legal approvals, the system will not be used in the future.”
From an engineering development perspective, the marine sector lags behind the aerial field. UAVs are a growing market, but marine autonomy is not. This makes technological development more expensive and slower, but also means that technology can be adopted from other sectors.
“For example, we have adapted the laser scanner from the automotive and industrial sectors, by fitting it with a gimbal and improving its ability to resist seawater and corrosion,” says Fioravanti.
There are several challenges that remain to be solved by Icarus. Number one is communications. A version of directional wi-fi technology is used, but this has limitations. “Reliable communications is a challenge, with the large distances to deal with,” says Fioravanti.
Bandwidth problems are also caused by the large amount of data created by the sensors, with congestion limiting the number of vehicles that can be simultaneously deployed, and the distance.
Geert De Cubber, the Icarus project’s coordinator from the Royal Military Academy of Belgium, says the main technical challenge is integrating different system specifications. “You have to integrate low-weight UAVs, with different processing and bandwidth capacities, and large-capacity ground vehicles. That influences the architecture and interoperability.” However, none of the integration problems is a show-stopper, he says. “It’s just a matter of cost and time.”
Another priority is to make the system user-friendly and reduce, if not eliminate, the time spent programming a ground, aerial and marine robot. “The end user doesn’t want full autonomy. He wants autonomous features that make his job easier, tools to do more jobs more safely and faster, such as autonomous mapping,” says De Cubber.
Next year, Icarus will demonstrate disaster situations, including a marine incident similar to the recent Costa Concordia disaster. This demonstration will use two marine vehicles, the scout and rescue lifeboat, as well as two UAVs.
The 21st century is shaping up to be the age of transport autonomy. Marine may be the last transport domain to look at the adoption of autonomous technology, but a growing number of engineers have realised the benefits it offers and are solving the problems needed to drive the sector forward.