Scientific Journals

Zeszyty Naukowe
of the Maritime University of Szczecin Akademii Morskiej w Szczecinie
2018, 53 (125), 28–34
ISSN 1733-8670 (Printed) Received: 24.10.2017
ISSN 2392-0378 (Online) Accepted: 08.01.2018
DOI: 10.17402/262 Published: 16.03.2018

Smart ships – autonomous or remote controlled?

Lech Kobyliński
Professor emeritus, Polish Academy of Sciences, Gdańsk University of Technology
Foundation for Safety of Navigation
16 Uphagena St., 80-237 Gdańsk, Poland, e-mail: lechk@portilawa.com

Key words: smart ships, big data, internet of things, revolution, autonomous, remote
Abstract
Nowadays the time of the smart ship is at the door. This is the result of the new, Fourth Industrial Revolution
that is fast approaching. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the result of an enormous increase in information
being acquired, stored, processed, and transmitted The effect of this has been smart domestic appliances, robots,
telephones, production machines, and other objects, visible everywhere in everyday life. There are obviously
many advantages to the introduction of smart vehicles and attempts to introduce smart cars into traffic are al-
ready in progress. Smart ships are also currently attracting much attention. RINA organized three international
conferences on this subject in a short space of time. An attempt to send a fully autonomous experimental ship
across the Atlantic is already in progress. Although technically it would be possible to already build smart
ships, there are many practical problems to be solved before they could be put into operation. Apart from
purely technical problems there are problems of the economy, safety, security, and environmental protection as
well as legal and political problems. There are also important problems regarding employment, training, and
human relations. Questions are now being asked as to whether smart ships would be fully autonomous, remote
controlled, or manned with a skeleton crew, and who will ultimately be responsible for the ship in question and
how smart ships will affect sea traffic. Some of these problems have been discussed in this paper.

Introduction and demand will for certain last for a long time and
will have an important impact on the ship manu-
Recently the introduction of smart products in facturing business. But such periods of recession
almost all aspects of life has been clearly visible. The are also times when all stakeholders are inclined to
possibility of the introduction of smart ships in sea invest in innovations preparing for a future period
transport has also been widely discussed. The idea of of prosperity. That is why all around the shipping
building smart ships is not new; Bertram (Bertram, world calls for smart ships, smart manufacturing,
2016) provided a short history of the development of and smart operation of ships is being heard.
the idea of smart ships and pointed out that this idea Some years ago this call would have gone in
was proposed at the end of the nineteenth century. vain because the technical possibilities did not exist.
Currently the global problem of overcapacity in Now we are witnessing the coming of the Fourth
shipping is clearly visible. This, according to the Industrial Revolution. The Fourth Industrial Rev-
general opinion of the shipping world, cannot be olution (4IR) is likely to occur around the middle
solved within a short time frame. Global newbuild of the twenty-first century and will cause the world
deliveries plummeted to just 18 million gross tonnes to become intelligent on the basis of an enormous
last year from over 83 million gross tonnes in 2015, increase in computing power.
which demonstrated that the crisis is important. In The result of this is that the capability of build-
China almost half of the 1600 existing shipyards ing and operating of a smart ship is already in our
face closure. The contradiction between oversupply hands. It is anticipated that by the year 2025 smart

28 Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin 53 (125)

 Smart ships – autonomous or remote controlled?

ships will regularly operate on international routes. technology. In fact everything that is needed to
The first autonomous experimental cargo ship will run fully autonomous or remote controlled ships is
presumably be ready by the end of this decade. already available.
Several advanced concepts for smart ships are
Concept of the smart ship currently under development, the leading company
in this area being Rolls-Royce. The concept of a low
It is important to define what is understood by cost container ship for the Baltic Sea, shown in Fig-
the term smart ship. According to the general under- ure 1, was recently presented by Oscar Levander,
standing the smart ship is a ship that is either: head of the company (Levander, 2017).
• remote controlled or
• fully autonomous.
In both cases the ship could be unmanned or
manned with a skeleton crew. Of course there may be
many different solutions adopted in both cases with
regard, for example, to the number and qualification
of the crew (if any) or the method of remote control,
either from the shore station or from an accompa-
nying ship (master-slave concept, where the “mas-
ter ship” may remotely control several accompany-
ing “slave ships”). But even with fully autonomous
ships humans will always be involved in some way Figure 1. Concept of low-cost smart container ship for the
or other to safely operate such ships. Baltic Sea (Levander, 2017)
If the ship is remotely controlled from a shore
station or from the other ship we have the concept of Big data and the Internet of Things (IoT)
the “shore captain” who will be controlling the ship
via satellite and the control system will be transferred A smart ship will be equipped with numerous
to shore or to another ship, where there is a naviga- sensors monitoring the ship and its functions, as well
tion crew similar to the crew normally present on as the close environment and the weather conditions
board, but assigned to several ships. If the ship is in the area of operation and the weather forecast.
fully autonomous, then we have the concept of the DNVGL estimates that around 15,000 to 20,000 dif-
“computer captain” and the ship will be equipped ferent sensors will be installed on board smart ships,
with a powerful computer and software that will take which will be constantly monitoring the:
all the decisions themselves using artificial intelli- • Navigation systems,
gence (Bertram, 2016). Certainly such a ship must • Safety systems,
be observed from the shore station, but the decision • Machinery and automation,
to override the ship’s systems could probably be tak- • Cargo
en only in an emergency. In practice it is possible • Environment.
that a mixture of both systems may be used. As the price of sensors has reduced rapidly during
Recently many “smart” installations have been the last few years (the average sensor cost is forecast
installed on board modern ships for different purpos- to fall to $0.38 in 2020 from $1.30 in 2004), there-
es such as making the operation of such ships safer fore the possibility to increase the number of sensors
and easier, for example, automatic mooring systems, onboard is almost unlimited (DNVGL, 2016). There
automatic collision avoidance systems and similar, have recently been advertised numerous examples of
but such ships are not called smart. sensors for constantly monitoring almost every part
According to the general opinion of technicians, of a ship’s hull and parts of its machinery because it
the technology needed to construct and operate smart is essential for a smart ship to discover any irregu-
ships is already available or, at least, in the final stag- larity before a failure occurs. This has been shown in
es of development. This applies to collecting, pro- an illustrative way in Figure 2 (The Naval Architect,
cessing, and transmitting the data from sensors and 2017c).
appliances on board the ship and transmitting it to First of all autonomous or remote controlled ships
the shore station, to a unified bridge for remote-con- need to assemble, process, and transmit enormous
trolled unmanned ships, to effective autonomous amount of data collected from thousands of sensors.
collision avoidance systems, and to advanced sensor This is defined as “Big Data”. Thousands of sensors

Zeszyty Naukowe Akademii Morskiej w Szczecinie 53 (125) 29

 Lech Kobyliński

may generate up to 36·107 and even more separate The important development that characterized
data points. the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the now widely
“Big Data is the term that describes large vol- discussed Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is dif-
umes of high velocity complex and variable data ficult to define, but it seems so important with the
that require advanced techniques and technologies development being applicable to the shipping indus-
to enable the capture, storage distribution, manage- try that a special supplement was issued in the Naval
ment and analysis of the information” (This very Architect this year where many of the most import-
relevant definition was proposed by Tech America ant people representing the shipping industry tried to
Foundation’s Federal Big Data Commission, 2012). define the IoT and discussed its impact on the marine
industry (The Naval Architect, 2017a). Simply the
IoT is a renewed approach to the ultimate data appli-
cation and its exploitation.
The IoT technology offers a means of combin-
ing the data from the already existing systems and
sensors on board, plus additional intelligent sensors
if necessary, in an intelligent system and then send
it via satellite to the cloud and to the shore office
(Figure 3) . This could be applicable to convention-
al ships, but will be essential for smart ships in the
future (The Naval Architect, 2017d).
The above considerations show that the technol-
ogy to build smart ships is actually already available
Figure 2. Pictorial presentation of the distribution of sensors or at least is under development, therefore there are
on board a smart ship (The Naval Architect, 2017c) no technical factors that would prevent the introduc-
tion of smart ships.
The capacity of data transfer from ships has
increased rapidly during the last few years, reaching Collision avoidance systems and bridge
about 12 Gbps in 2016, depending on the band used, layout
according to recent information (DNVGL, 2016).
The newly developed Big Data platform has been The creation of collision and grounding avoid-
designed to cleanse and manage the data collected ance systems is a nautical task of predominant
from a number of sensors constantly monitoring the importance. An autonomous ship collision avoid-
ship. In spite of the fact that processing the data on ance system may use the same information sources
board can considerably reduce the amount of data as in existing ships, e.g. radar transponders and elec-
that needs to be transmitted to the shore station, this tronic charts, but there will be no vision or hearing
amount still remains large. However it was actually input from the crew members on the bridge. In this
shown that processing and transmitting this amount area, however, there is a rapidly developing technol-
of data could be done as cheaply as 1$ per day (Ger- ogy that compensates for vision and hearing
manischer Lloyd, 2013), therefore there are no prac- The newly developed Intelligent Awareness
tical difficulties to do so. The largest classification System made by Rolls Royce that has already been
society, DNVGL, admitted that actually they were installed in the 65 meter ferry boat Stella owned
taken by surprise by this. by Finferries, is for vessels of any type and is an
example of new technology that actually makes it
possible to run smart ships (The Naval Architect,
2017b). As the company stated: “The system func-
tions as an advisory tool that empowers decision
makers with a greater understanding of a ship’s
surrounding environment. Its application is partic-
ularly aimed at the safe navigation of busy ports,
for example a large cruise ship navigating the port
of Shanghai, or operating in challenging environ-
Figure 3. Infographic of data transfer from onboard to the ments, such as dense fog experienced in Houston
shore office (The Naval Architect, 2017d) shipping channels”.

30 Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin 53 (125)

 Smart ships – autonomous or remote controlled?

Figure 4. Rolls Royce’s intelligent awareness bridge system (The Naval Architect, 2017b)

The system offers a unique birds-eye view of the seconds (the present standard). Similar systems will
environment including the bottom profile, as shown be used in smart ships, however the amount of data
in Figure 4. Technologies such as machine vision, will be considerably larger. In fully autonomous
automatic ship identification, high definition camer- or remote controlled ships the complete situational
as, laser-based systems (LIDAR), RADAR and AIS awareness and all pieces of the arrangement of the
data, and enhanced ECDIS automatic avoidance bridge must be recreated at an artificial bridge in the
path planning are already available or under devel- shore station. As pointed out by Levander (Levander,
opment. All the facilities will be incorporated into 2016) this would not replicate the real ship’s bridge,
one system on the bridge. Furthermore it is envis- but create a virtual environment creating an even
aged that augmented reality will also be used. better 360° view, and will also show close proximity
In the smart ship all the parameters that are cur- situations, such as a pilot coming onboard and sim-
rently recorded or observed on the bridge must be ilar operations.
processed and sent to the shore station. It is essential
that they must be transmitted continuously without Maritime law and human factors
any break or interruption and because of safety rea-
sons they should be duplicated. The ship’s Voyage Smart ships may create a great challenge to cur-
Data Record (VDR) is where data from all the sen- rent maritime law. This subject was discussed thor-
sors are stored on board. This has been compulsory oughly in the paper by Balls (Balls, 2016). It appears
for all ships since the SOLAS 2002 amendment. But that commercial operation of unmanned or remote-
in smart ships the VDR will collect Big Data from ly controlled ships may require the amendment
several thousands of sensors. However, information of almost all international conventions related to
provided by the sensors cannot be managed prop- marine transport. In his paper Balls thoroughly dis-
erly; therefore special dedicated systems for storing cussed which of these regulations and conventions
and processing the data must be developed. The data may need to be amended.
will then be stored in the cloud for further access Initially smart ships may operate with an exemp-
by the shore office. This amount of data cannot be tion certificate as novel ships and the proper Admin-
effectively observed at the shore station directly. istration may also require their temporary require-
There are already systems such as Kyma Web Solu- ments to be satisfied. Equivalency rules in existing
tions (DNVGL, 2016) for example, that enables ship conventions may also be applicable in some cases.
owners in the shore office to manage and analyse But the definition of novel ship may only be applied
this data, ultimately displaying them every fifteen during the first period when few smart ships will

Zeszyty Naukowe Akademii Morskiej w Szczecinie 53 (125) 31

 Lech Kobyliński

operate. When they will constitute a large proportion Safety and security
of the fleet this solution will be not possible.
In all legal instruments a “ship” is defined as Safety and security are other matters that may
a manned object. Manned ships with some auton- affect the possibility of the introduction of smart
omous systems will fall under this definition. How- ships into practical operation. The most important
ever it is clear that unmanned ships do not. This old safety problems are safety against adverse effects of
principle, with regard to shipping, was based on the the sea (intact stability), safety against collisions and
assumption that full responsibility for the ship at groundings that may cause damage to the hull, and
sea lies with the master who is onboard and is “the safety against fire (fire protection).
first after God”. This view has already been partially The safety measures against the capsizing of
challenged with the development of on line commu- intact ships for smart ships are not different from the
nication with the ship owner’s office on shore that measures applicable to conventional vessels. The
may recommend the master to take certain actions, intact stability of a ship may be impaired in adverse
although those actions at present mainly concern weather conditions. Generally ships should avoid
commercial affairs not affecting the technical opera- dangerous situations at sea where there is a possi-
tion of the ship which still remains the sole respon- bility of resonance or parametric resonance with
sibility of the master. But still full responsibility for oncoming waves that may result in extreme roll
the operation of the ship at sea is in hands of the angles. There are also some other situations in rough
master. seas to be avoided, for example broaching and surf
Operation of autonomous ships controlled from riding. However ships are already usually provided
the shore station put full responsibility for the ship at with instructions to the master to avoid those situa-
sea in the hands of this station. It is, however, ques- tions that could be achieved by changing speed or
tionable as to whether the man in control at the shore heading or both. On board smart ships this could be
office could be assessed as “the captain”. This would done automatically without problems as the environ-
be the most important issue; acceptance of this ment will be constantly observed and recorded.
change by the conservative shipping world would However situations may arise at sea that are
need to overcome legal and emotional barriers. almost impossible to forecast. One of these situ-
Emotional barriers against the introduction of ations is a tsunami. Tsunamis are rare events and
autonomous ships should not to be dismissed lightly. usually are not dangerous for ships on the open sea,
As said before, the shipping world is rather conser- because the wave created by an earthquake in the
vative and the seafaring profession has high self-es- open sea is extremely long and only becomes dan-
teem. Abandoning the position of ship master and gerous when approaching the shoreline. However
replacing it with an anonymous controller in the another rare event that may happen in the open sea
shore control station may be considered as devalu- is a freak wave. Freak waves, although extremely
ing the profession. This may induce negative feel- rare, may reach a height of up to forty metres or even
ings against the introduction of unmanned ships. more in certain conditions and may cause a ship to
Replacing active ship crews in ships with a minimal founder. Freak waves are unpredictable, they appear
crew for inspections and emergency, working bor- at random and it would be rather impossible to
ing shifts, will also devalue the attractiveness of the develop an automatic avoidance system or mitigate
profession. the consequences of this phenomenon. The positive
An important issue is also the present regulation fact is that the probability of meeting a freak wave is
in respect to the manning of ships in the international extremely small.
STCW Convention (Standards of Training, Certifi- The same applies to fire protection. Fire protec-
cation and Watchkeeping) will need to be entirely tion currently is assured with restrictions in the use of
changed, which may create significant protests from flammable materials as well as ships being equipped
the trade unions. with automatic fire fighting appliances such as auto-
Another problem that will not be easily solved is matic sprinkler systems etc. The same will be appli-
how to implement the current regulations on search cable to smart ships. Also with the use of fire fight-
and rescue operations at sea for smart ships. Accord- ing ships there would be no difference whether the
ing to current regulations all ships are obliged to par- ship is conventional or unmanned. A problem may
ticipate in search operations at sea and rescue people be present in passenger ships where evacuation situ-
in distress. This certainly could not be entirely appli- ations may occur and evacuation operations require
cable to autonomous ships. human command. But actually there have been no

32 Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin 53 (125)

 Smart ships – autonomous or remote controlled?

proposals to introduce unmanned passenger ships, many factors, such as insurance cost, salaries, etc,
apart from river crossing ferries. may contribute to the total cost of transport in a dif-
The most serious problem with smart ships may ferent way to how it is today.
be security against pirate attack. It could be phys-
ical attack such as happens now in some parts of Prospects for the future
the world, but, more importantly electronic attack,
where pirate-hackers may take control of a ship that It is important to have some vision about what
is unmanned or manned only with a small crew. It types of ships may operate as smart in the future.
seems that a physical attack on an unmanned ship is There are already some types of autonomous vehi-
not very realistic, because an unmanned ship could cles in operation, such as underwater or surface
be constructed without any easily accessible open- robots used for different purposes, but they are not
ings and in such ships pirates actually have very lim- defined as ships.
ited ways to enter. Even if they enter, the automatic Apart from special purpose ships and warships,
system may shut down all facilities and it is very all other ships are either cargo ships or passenger
improbable that the pirates will have tugs to tow ships. It is quite obvious, that passenger ships can-
a disabled ship to their safe harbour. not be fully autonomous or remote controlled. Such
Another case would be when pirates take over ships sometimes carry thousands of passengers, and
control of the ship electronically. In such cases the the corresponding number of hotel staff and crew
ship could be directed to certain harbours, opened, members. Passengers must be supervised all the
unloaded, and expensive goods removed. Ransom time, their needs should be taken into account and
in such cases may be not the prime purpose of the their behaviour, that sometimes is unpredictable,
attack. controlled. Although autopilots and similar arrange-
ments may be installed on board, the captain should
Economic considerations exercise flexibility in piloting his ship taking into
account the current situation on board, in particular
There is the question as to whether smart ships having regard to human relations. Apart from being
will be economically profitable. Obviously the the captain and piloting his ship in high seas he is
cost of the crew in fully autonomous ships would also the general manager of a very large hotel, hav-
be much lower, as well as a semi-autonomous ship ing under his command his crew members and also
where only a skeleton crew consisting of three- four a number of hotel staff. A “computer captain” cannot
persons would be onboard. Also the removal of crew do this.
accommodations and the connected facilities will However, according to the definition included
reduce the building cost and this space could be used in the SOLAS convention, a passenger ship is any
to carry more cargo. The entire large superstructure ship carrying more than 12 passengers. The SOLAS
and deckhouse will be not necessary and the reduced convention only applies, however, to international
air resistance could result in fuel consumption sav- voyages. Therefore small ferries taking passengers
ings. Levander (Levander, 2016) predicted that this across narrow waters could be handled without crew,
could result in about 12 to 15 per cent fuel saving controlled only by a shore station. Such ships are the
for a 40,000 dwt bulk carrier. Also the consequence first candidates for conversion to smart ships and
of lower daily operating costs will result in a low- certain attempts to operate such ferries in national
er average speed which will bring further savings in waters are already being undertaken.
fuel consumption. The area where smart ships may be possibly used
Certainly the required installation of an addition- is the transport of goods, presumably in bulk or in
al number of expensive appliances as well as redun- containers. Therefore it may be assumed that in the
dant machinery will drive up the building cost, but future container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers may
automatization, communication, and an increased be the best candidates to be constructed as “smart”
number of sensors will be used in all ships in the ships.
future. Levander thought that the difference in the It also seems that future smart ships will most
cost between manned and unmanned ships will be likely be operated with a small skeleton crew on
not large. At present, however, it is very difficult to board. This certainly will reduce risk in case a fail-
predict whether autonomous or remote controlled ure happens on board during the voyage. If some-
ships will be economically viable because there are thing happens to a fully autonomous unmanned ship,
no ships of this kind in operation, and in the future the ship certainly could be stopped, but then a repair

Zeszyty Naukowe Akademii Morskiej w Szczecinie 53 (125) 33

 Lech Kobyliński

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