UNMANNED VESSELS
Just as it is on land, unmanned vehicles are the next frontier for transportation at sea. From the small 2m Sailbuoy, designed to stay on station without an anchor, to the 72ft Surveyor from US outfit Saildrone, a range of tactics and technology is being used to steer clear of other craft. Sailbuoy is designed to be harmless in collision, so its sole defence are the words ‘stay clear’ stencilled on its rigid sail. Saildrone ‘vehicles’ primarily use AIS to identify and avoid nearby vessels, and there’s always a human pilot in control from the remote control centre in California.
But most interesting is the project being developed by a consortium including IBM and the non-profit marine science group Promare. Their craft is called the Mayflower, and it’s a mastless 15m trimaran studded with solar panels that relies on electric propulsion. It combines radar, AIS and range-finding Lidar with state-of-theart image processing and machine learning. Mayflower can ask for human help, but should be capable of making its own decisions based on identifying different obstacles and anticipating certain behaviour from them. Ultimately, though, the legal landscape has to shift before this technology becomes widely accepted. Regulation must adapt to tolerate unmanned vessels and the ‘decisions’ they make about collision avoidance.