Similar to the autonomous vehicle technology, which is gaining popularity around the world, self-sailing ships or autonomous ships are also becoming the focus for various companies, including Samsung, Rolls Royce and SK Telecom.
What are the recent developments in the self-sailing ship’s market?
Electronics Guru
There has been some progress for developing autonomous ships. The autonomous ships are also using the same technology and sensors as autonomous vehicles, such as lidar, radar and cameras. The camera needs to be high pixel because of focus on small objects around the horizon, such as boats. The automation of boats is considered safe as compare to automated vehicles because there are no congestions or sudden interventions as such on roads.
Some of the developments around the world include the focus of Rolls Royce in the development of automated ships. It already offered the ships with augmented reality to continuously watch the environment around vessels. The system shows every other water user and objects, and also the shores and navigators. It is operated through gathering all the data from the sensors placed around the vessel. Rolls Royce plans to make fully autonomous ships and has started some trials.
The other Norwegian company known as Yara international is also seemed much focused towards the development of autonomous vessels. It also teamed up with Cargotech and Kongsberg, under which they planned to test and deploy the fully electric and autonomous vessel in 2019.
Maersk also launched a remotely-controlled commercial vessel in 2017.
Teleco
In December 2019, SK Telecom and Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) developed the 5G-based autonomous and remote-controlled navigation test platform. During the testing, which took place in the sea near SHI’s Geoje Shipyard, a 3.3-meter long ship was used for testing. The ship was manufactured by SHI. On the other hand, SK Telecom provided the 5G-based LiDAR, T Live Caster, and cloud-based IoT platform.
The ship was controlled from 250 kilometres distance and was sailed to its destination avoiding all obstacles. Both tests proved that ship could be controlled and sail autonomously and also showed the 5G capability to control the ship in real-time remotely.
Although it was just the starting, and more developments and improvements are required, especially in case of sailing near the coast.