After seeing how autonomous driving cars work for now it's clear that they will become daily drivers in a few decades. Not the same thing happens with autonomous boats that might become a reality sooner. Actually by 2020.
Because the sea is much more unpredictable than roads that don't change their course from one day to another the need for artificial captains is becoming a reality. If in the case of cars, a human driver is still a must for now, in the case of boats artificial captains might become a safer solution in just a few years. One that will guide cargo and passengers through rocky shores safer and cheaper.
“Ships worth hundreds of millions of dollars shouldn’t be able to be manually driven onto the rocks. We have the technology available to control these vessels”
marine engineer Michael Johnson
Although captains have perfected their sailing skills throughout the centuries to protect expensive cargo and passengers oceans and seas are still unpredictable. With 90% of the worlds commercial transports being carried by sea and about 10,3 billion tons of merchandise registered in 2016 it's easy to understand why the rush to make autonomous boats a reality.
On dry land seems that robots will come in hand for installing the IKEA furniture that gives us headaches. The solution to make the task easier came from Nayang Technological University researchers from Singapore. They plan to make a furniture assembling robot that will install "his" first IKEA chair followed by other pieces of furniture in the future.
Using two arms, pressure sensors and a video camera the robot managed to assemble a chair in nine minutes with pieces spread all over the floor. The autonomous robot accomplished his task successfully and opened the perspective of future autonomous factories that will replace humans.
I guess what's left for us humans to do is to enjoy cruises on autonomous boats and search new planets to start a new human evolution from scratch...
SOURCES:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne95qm/autonomous-boats-will-be-here-before-self-driving-cars
https://theoutline.com/post/4214/robot-arms-can-build-an-ikea-chair-in-less-than-nine-minutes?zd=1&zi=4onkxino
Quite much stuff on sea is terribly simple to automate. I have a very "stupid" autopilot, but sometimes I feel I can rely on the autopilot, radar warning and shallow depth warning for longer stretches i.e. while sitting on the toilet, doing dishwashes, having a short nap, etc.
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If you can have a nap it seems your "stupid" autopilot is doing pretty good job, but I guess the fun part of having a boat is to sail it yourself. For the commercial ships going autonomous would be an important progress.
I never sailed a boat, but I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon on a boat last year in Norway. I don't remember exactly the name of the harbor from where we lift, but we went to an island in the vicinity and it was a nice experience.
No autopilot though...Just Jon and his skills :-)
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Well, there is a difference between 4 knots and 20 knots. With 20 knots I probably would have kept a watch even in the open sea :-) With my slow boat, the auto-pilot is really essential.
I believe that (at least for the slow boat, and even with yesterdays tech), the auto pilot could easily handle the very most of the navigation, including route planning, collision avoidance and such - at least when going by engine. Even for my navigation system all that would be needed for this would be a simple software upgrade. I believe most navigation systems of today are intentionally stupid to avoid any kind of liability shift.
Sailing by sails requires quite much more. There are technologies like the SkySail, I believe it's fully autonomous and designed to be installed on cargo ships.
Getting in and out of a difficult harbour when it's windy outside can be a real challenge - it's hard to see that being done by computers, though I guess in the end of the day the AI should be able to do a better job than humans on that one.
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I guess that's what this kind of AI was invented for. Do the hard job safer and step aside in the fun job that is this humans territory.
If I would have a small boat I wouldn't like to have one fully autonomous just to just sit in it and enjoy the view. The same attitude I have about autonomous driving cars. The tech is amazing and will be very useful for big cities and long night drives, but at the end of the day I am a driver and I enjoy alot driving...almost any type of cars.
When mixing AI with humans I can make a pretty good picture about the future, but relying only on AI for almost everything sounds too boring.
Maybe I am just old fashioned...
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Well, there is also the difference between 20 knots and 4 knots ...
For a slow-going boat, 90% of the navigation can be done fully automatically quite simply, including route-planning and perhaps even things like trimming sails. I believe most autopilots on the market refuses to do anything more advanced than going straight due to the potential for liability shift.
Then the really difficult things like organizing fenders and ropes, navigating in a tight and windy harbour, fixing things that breaks, problems with stuck sails and whatnot. Hard to see those things being done by robots in the near future - though I know there is done quite some research on fully autonomous ships in Norway.
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