In the coming months, 3 container ships, one Japanese, one Finnish and one Norwegian, will raise anchor. After that, the seas will never be the same again.
Japan and Norway are working separately on the same goal: to make a container ship travel completely autonomously. The goal is that in the seas commercial traffic, which is growing in intensity month after month, can become even cheaper because it is carried out unmanned, that is, without one of the major cost items for the managers of a fleet of cargo ships.
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Japan
The Japanese ship will set sail thanks to the coordinated efforts of the Nippon Foundation and Nippon Yusen Kk, the largest Japanese merchant company. The ship, which is being set up in these months, will follow a route of almost 400 kilometers through one of the routes with the highest density of naval traffic: from Tokyo Bay to the city of Ise, in the prefecture of Mie. The test, which represents the field test after a series of experiments carried out in the past in the laboratory or with short controlled exits, according to the experts will be little less than revolutionary. Artificial intelligence will be at the helm not only of the ship, but also of the on-board systems that ensure the proper functioning of large boats and supervise their cargo, consisting of hundreds of containers.
Norway
In Norway, the development was done by the Vard shipyard together with the technology company Kongsberg Maritime. According to CNN, this second ship will also have the particularity of being zero emissions and totally autonomous. Her maiden voyage, however, will be on a much more limited scale and will touch two Norwegian ports to verify the feasibility of the voyage and will have a “control group” which, without intervening, will supervise the operation of on-board systems for make sure your computer does everything as it should. The ship will also be controlled by 3 ground centers, which will share the responsibility of verifying the correct functioning of the autonomous systems.
Finland
The Norwegian and Japanese ships aren’t the first self-driving ships: in 2018, Finland debuted the first fully electric, self-driving container ship, developed by chemical giant Yara International. There Yara Birkeland, this is her name, will make her first voyage by the end of the year, while the Norwegian is not expected to take off the moorings before February 2022. Instead, it is possible that the Japanese container ship will leave earlier and perhaps even beat the Finns, although the managers of the Japanese company have so far talked about goals that go beyond 2022 and operational use for commercial purposes no earlier than 2025.
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The market situation
The shipping sector accounts for about 3% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization. But the problem is not just that of pollution. Autonomous driving of these gigantic trucks of the sea it is also necessary because many countries (such as Japan) see crews aging without a replacement: in the cargo sector, 40% of crews are over 55 years old. Increasing the efficiency of this sector through the use of electric ships and above all artificial intelligence systems means increasing the Japanese economy by almost 9 billion euros between now and 2040. The self-driving maritime transport sector will be worth 143 billions of euros by 2030, Satoru Kuwahara told Bloomberg, general manager of Japan Marine Science, a subsidiary of Nippon Yusen.
Furthermore, according to industry studies, 70% of maritime accidents are caused by human error: autonomous driving in this sector would increase safety. According to the Nippon Foundation, 50% of the Japanese-flagged cargo fleet could be completely unmanned by 2040. The common goal of all projects, the Japanese one and those of the Northern European countries, is to be ready from the point of commercial view by 2025 with at least one operational ship.
The technological approaches of the 3 systems, although different in implementation, follow a similar logic: coastal control centers process information that comes from satellites and from the tracking systems of the ships, as well as from the detections of the artificial intelligence systems on board the ships and plan a series of objectives that the ship must reach within the planned route in outline before departure. These objectives can be en route, with adjustments to avoid traffic or a bad weather area, rather than seakeeping, or traffic or load management (which is dynamically adjusted to control the ship). In any case, the artificial intelligence system should be able to make all decisions autonomously. Even without instructions.
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