After Driverless Cars, Now Sailor-Less Ships: Rolls Royce To Develop Autonomous Vessels In Collaboration With Intel

Rolls Royce and Intel will be jointly developing autonomous ships, Interesting Engineering has reported. Rolls Royce announced that it would develop fully autonomous ships with no humans on board by the year 2025. As part of the longer plan, the company introduced its Intelligent Awareness System for crewed ships earlier this year.

“The system is the first of our Ship Intelligence, remote and autonomous solutions to be developed for commercial marine application. Combining multiple sensors with intelligent software, IA is designed to mitigate the risks navigators face, especially in poor weather conditions, congested waters or at night. Essentially, it gives the master and bridge personnel a supreme understanding of the ship’s surroundings,” the company described the new technology on its website.

The autonomous ship will have a large network full of cameras, radar, and LIDAR, which will be controlled by a centralised program. Vision algorithms on board the proposed autonomous ship will be able to detect obstacles in night time and within busy ports.

Rolls Royce has struck a deal with Intel to use 3D NAND solid-state drives for storing the data that would come from this network. Intel Xeon chips will be used to process this information. Technologies jointly developed by Intel and Rolls Royce are aimed at improving visibility during the night and overall safety of ships.