Veolia Water Technologies by GineersNow Engineering Magazine GineersNow Engineering Magazine September 2016 | Page 29

ROLLS-ROYCE WANTS
AUTONOMOUS SHIPPING
FOR CARGO SHIPS
It’s a trend in automotive
companies to make cars
driverless nowadays. If a
company’s not planning to
produce an autonomous car,
then chances are they’ll get
left behind by technology.
Later on, people would
start choosing cars that no
longer requires people to
drive it anymore. But how
about ships? Would heavy
cargo ships be safe to travel
without crews inside it?
Now, Rolls-Royce PLC wants
autonomous
shipping
to be the future of water
transportation. In a paper
(Advanced
Autonomous
Waterborn e Applications)
released by the company,
it announced its plans of
making ships driverless.
Oskar
Levander,
the
company’s Vice President of
Innovation - Marine, spoke
during the Autonomous
Ship Technology Symposium
2016 and said:
“This is happening. It’s not if,
it’s when. The technologies
needed to make remote and
autonomous ships a reality
exist. The AAWA project is
testing sensor arrays in a
range of operating and
climatic conditions in Finland
and has created a simulated
autonomous ship control
system which allows the
behaviour of the complete
communication system to
be explored. We will see a
remote controlled ship in
commercial use by the end
of the decade.”
These driverless ships would
only be communicating
via satellite. If anything
happens within the ships,
people assigned in control
site would send drones over
to check what’s wrong.
Photo by DesignBoom
SEPTEMBER 2016
Clean Water Technologies
29