Jan 2, 2019 1:00 AM

Self-driving ships are here to clean up our gridlocked roads

Autonomous shipping will lead to more cargo traffic on the oceans – and much less on land

In northern Europe in the Middle Ages, the amount of maritime traffic in coastal waters was significant – cargo was moved by sea, as land routes were patchy. In 2019, autonomous shipping will begin to open up coastal routes again, only this time the ships will have no captains, no crews and certainly no parrots. The first to make it to water will be the Yara Birkeland, a zero-emissions battery-powered container ship designed to carry fertiliser between ports in the fjords of southern Norway.

The idea was Bjørn Tore Orvik’s, Yara’s Project Hub Manager for Scandinavia. “If you look at overcrowding on roads in Europe, this is a fantastic opportunity to start to use the sea as a road again,” he says. Yara’s fertiliser tanker will not be alone for long. Scandinavia leads in the development of remote and autonomous shipping, but Japan, South Korea and the US have all invested heavily. 2019 could be as a crucial year for live pilot schemes to hit the water, when Orvik predicts a raft of new projects will launch.

“Yara Birkeland is just the beginning,” he says. “Now we’ve started, I think we will see projects funded and going into execution phase.”

Battery-powered vessels can be recharged in port while being loaded and unloaded, and no crew means no need for air-conditioning, lighting and water, or superstructures such as the bridge. This both increases cargo space and makes the ship more energy efficient. When the Yara Birkeland becomes fully autonomous in 2020, it will cut 40,000 lorry journeys per year. Iiro Lindborg, Vice President of R&D in remote and autonomous ships at Rolls-Royce also believes 2019 is when companies will start to demonstrate new projects. “The technology is ready,” he says, “and more or less ready to be used commercially as well.”

In November 2017, Rolls-Royce successfully remotely operated a retrofitted tugboat called the Svitzer from an onshore station, over existing mobile networks. The task was a high bar, as harbour manoeuvres are more troublesome than open sea navigation: decisions need to be made quickly and accurately, and moving obstacles in tight waterways leaves little room for error.

Rolls-Royce is a good example of just how fast this technology is developing. It began working on concepts in 2013, opened an R&D centre for autonomous and remote shipping in 2015, and two years later executed the Svitzer demo. It now has a number of projects in the pipeline, with more to be announced in 2019.

In the near future, autonomous ships could replace ferries, coastal cargo traffic, tug boats and pilotage, and within ten years will be undertaking longer journeys on the open sea. Lindborg says the key challenge is not the technology – most of this exists elsewhere in autonomous cars and aerospace. What might land these projects in the doldrums is a lag in drawing up new regulations and legislation – completely new frameworks for liabilities need to be made when there is nobody on board navigating. Connectivity is also a hurdle – while Lindborg’s tug operated over existing 3G and 4G mobile networks, this isn’t possible for a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, although the cruise boom is developing mobile infrastructure at pace.

Lindborg says the current phase of activity is just a first generation for autonomous shipping and mainly involves the transfer of controls from ship to shore. The next step is for vessels to be making their own navigational decisions based on the surrounding environment, but this second generation is not far behind the first. Lindborg predicts a fully unmanned vessel sailing international waters by 2025. “The second generation is even more exciting,” he says. “I think the time for that is coming quite soon.”

Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and researcher specialising in maritime issues