Controlling the boat near the dock is probably more difficult than cars or air planes since swells/waves/winds can move the boat relative to the dock. The robot needs to read the water and wind to protect the boat from collisions.
As taxis, docking/taking on passengers is tricky since it needs to handle situations when people cling onto rails and risk getting stuck between the boat and the dock.
A single prop with a bow thruster, or especially without, can't move freely in the 2D space which makes it much more complicated because you have to move towards the dock with the correct angle depending on wind, current and what not. Then time your maneuvers while taking the environment and for example prop walk [2] and other effects into consideration.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_positioning
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=491RkaOYfr4 Volvo Penta Assisted Docking
The goal then for the robot is not to position itself in 2D space with meter-level precision, the goal is to behave reliably and predictably in the harbour under chaotic circumstances, with sub-meter precision. That requires predicting movements and drift, taking wind into account. Since this is almost impossible, skippers learn to read the water/wind to understand what is appropriate for safety distances, speed, angles, etc.
A road vehicle could just refuse to move if the environment becomes unrecognizable, but a boat keeps on moving, so the robot can not just "give up".
It's true that thrusters increase the manoeuvrability.
For a layman, it sounds as the same kind of difficulty as controlling a drone in the air. It's not perception and identification of millions of different objects, neither it is predicting other driver's behaviour on the road — it's a physical process. Computers seem to be quite effective at adapting to that.
You are right though, being by the dock is harder although at this point, you are likely to have some kind of personnel to help tether the boat to the quay.
They are designing a self-driving boat without using sonars not radars due to their budget. It's fun but of little relevance to the real world. Most of their problems would be solved or at least heavily alleviated with access to the relevant sensors.
Still, that's quite impressive for a college project built on a shoe string.
Also, pirates would become a problem because taking over a ship without a crew would easier and way less risk.
Consider patrol drones. They look nothing like something an individual can get into.
About pirates, no, they work will become much harder if you don't have anybody they can point a gun to and tell to stop the ship.
The city of Ghent was eyeing autonomous small crafts as "water taxis", and a big shipping provider wanted to do last-mile(s) delivery for shops, restaurants, and small parcel pickup points along a river. For the latter case, the vessel would still be manned, but instead of having to navigate, that person could sort and prepare parcels for delivery.
Also, a significant amount of money is spent providing 24 hour cover of navigation in the bridge so I guess you could save something by automating a lot of it.
You are probably right that in the extreme, it would be better to have some humans to make sure your containers make it to their destination!
By coincidence, they also had an experiment in Amsterdam.
Note: Friends of me.
tell your friends I'm rooting for them thats an interesting project
- Their IOT big data platform ( Atlantis - https://www.dotocean.eu/products/atlantis/)
- Dredging canals cheaper
- Autonomous boats
- Underwater soil detection with a probe
I'm not really sure if there is a specific focus on open waters though, but i don't think so.
Wind and current doesn't really matter as long as you have dynamic position which abstracts it away as long as you keep within your power budget. The real hard part here is moving through a shifting environment, for example the current often reverses along banks. Especially in a river based harbor environment where you've created piers and what not disrupting the flow.
In a previous life I worked as a skipper in just those conditions, passenger ferries in the 25-40m sizes with a couple of hundred passengers in river harbour environment. Two props and bowthruster and you have to keep all the considerations you mention in account. Especially since you can't angle the stern without angling the bow (duh) when you're applying reverse thrust to dock. And with some speed forward you move the center of rotation forward making the bow thruster less effective.
It was actually easier with quite a strong wind since then that would overcome the current easily and you would lie on the wind margin side of things. If you come too high just make the docking take a bit longer so you would blow down and land perfectly. In almost calm conditions you would instead have to guess which would win that time, wind or current.
That said, the ones with two pods, one at each end you just balance things out and go straight to the dock.
Besides which, an automated ship is about a trio of tugs, a computer replacement, and a buncha fuel away from anywhere.
You mean deliberately sink a $10 million ship, causing a massive environmental disaster. Not to mention being a hazard to other shipping if the water is shallow enough or the ship breaks apart.
Do you blow up a grocery store because someone attempts to steal a jar of pickles?
The question for an insurance company isn’t just about this ship, but the cost of paying out future hijackings. On top of this there is the rather more interesting option of refloating the ship.
As to DDoS, sinking isn’t any more of a risk than someone taking over control of your self driving boat and aiming it at the coastline. From a pure safety standpoint you need some method of remotely disabling the ship.
The ships can be worth quite a bit when new, but their also depreciating assets with only a few percent of that in scrap value. Only using the least valuable ships in areas that can be pirates seems like an obvious optimization.
At the same time actively preventing piracy is expensive. Having a significant armed security force on a boat is effective, but paying for them when 99.999% of the time when their not needed isn’t cost effective. Making it clear that attacking a ship is pointless on the other hand is a great way to avoid getting attacked in the first place, but you need to be willing to carry through.
Who cares? You seem to be assuming that security force does nothing else but sit around in case of piracy. In reality, we call these people "mariners", they are trained specialists at maintaining the hardware with which they ply their trade, they know the customs and rules to follow in diverse ports of call, and they are there to provide boots on the ground and hands on tools if something goes sideways.
There is a huge difference between bodies on the boat, and no body on the boat. You cross that line, and leave no bodies on the boat to look after things, and you now have a floating puzzle full of other people's stuff, owner's of which are not necessarily going to be happy that you decided to drop their load to the bottom of the ocean to "prove a point" where you can't even guarantee that the entire point wasn't the pirates making sure some shipment didn't show up in the first place.
Hell, if it wasn't you, the shipper, making the scuttle decision, and was actually the local Navy on justification of "no negotiation", fine. Though that really just punts the issue to international waters.
No one will blame you or foster ill-will for doing everything you could and failing anyway. People will have hard feelings if you come up and say, we blew up all your stuff because those damn dirty pirates. They paid you to get their stuff from A to B, you decided C was better.
All of this "let's go unmanned" just really seems to me to be a solution looking for a problem, and not being shy about creating a few more while we're at it.