Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Autonomous freighters...

Autonomous freighters...  I'm expecting these to be the first widely-deployed autonomous vehicles, followed by trucks and trains (in that order).  The economics are so compelling that I don't see how it won't happen.  Even including expensive mitigation of safety concerns (e.g., quick-reaction teams pre-positioned worldwide), the economics are still compelling...

2 comments:

  1. I don't understand. How is the cargo secured from pirates and stowaways? What keeps a boat from sailing up and spending a week or two looting the cargo containers? ...especially if they can find the ones with the laptops, 4k TV's, ipads, hard disks, IC's, video cards, caviar, musical instruments, etc. Are they planning to detect this with cameras and motion sensors and then fly helicopters out, or something?

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  2. In most of the world today, manned ships are completely unprotected. The vast majority of merchant marine crew don't even carry small arms, let alone anything that would deter a determined pirate. And actually the presence of crew (who can be threatened) are important to the pirate's modus operandi: they get aboard with grappling hooks or by climbing an anchor chain, then threaten the crew to get them to direct the vessel to the pirate's port (or, sometimes, to simply stop the merchant vessel to enable offloading to the pirate's vessel). A robotic system that just refused to obey them leaves the pirates with very little leverage.

    But the proposals being floated include the permanent stationing of anti-pirate forces in pirate-infested waters, similar to what has already been done in Somalia. Today that's a strictly additive cost, but with the robotic vessels the savings in crew costs more than pays for those forces...

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