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Intel and Rolls Royce have announced a collaboration to create a world wide system to support autonomous ship navigation to make commercial shipping safer and more effective.
The oceans are huge, and seas are quite broad too, so it would seem that autonomous navigation shouldn’t be such a big issue. If you compare the number of commercial ships (52,183 as of January 2017) with the number of cars (slightly over 1 billion cars) and considering that the water area of plane Earth is bigger than the land area (71% vs 29%) it should be obvious that there is so much easier to deal with autonomous ships than with cars. However, you should also take into account that a commercial ship is way bigger than a car ( a ship may contain up to 8,500 cars…) and that the problem is when ships converge to ports. Notice as well that most ships follow unmarked roads in their travel over the seas and oceans, dictated by the shortest distance from port to port and the prevailing currents (winds are no longer as important as they were in the past).
There are no pedestrians in the sea, true, but there are plenty of small boats when you get close to shore, and they are the equivalent of pedestrian from a navigation point of view.
In their announcement Intel and Rolls Royce indicate the development of several shipping intelligent systems connected via data centres (this I find interesting: connection is no longer through communications lines, rather through data -of course data run on communications lines but the focus is on the data in data centres).
Artificial Intelligence will be used both centrally (in the data centres) and at the edges and guess what? Each ship will have its digital twin, modelling the ship characteristics and representing the ship in the data center. Navigation will be managed through edge computing on board of each ship, a fully autonomous system reacting to its environment.
Intel and Rolls Royce expect this will be a revolution in the world of commercial shipping, further decreasing transportation cost, hence shrinking the world even more.
We may expect floating manufacturing plants picking up raw materials and transforming them as they are being transported, as it already happens in the fishing industry.
