Autonomous vessels: fact or fiction?

The technology needed to develop fully autonomous vessels, known as Maritime Autonomous Suface Ships or MASS, already exists today. Through cameras, radars, advanced processors or other technology, ships are being developed with an intelligent consciousness system. In other words, they can efficiently detect other vessels and floating objects during routes, avoid collisions and navigate safely both at sea and in coastal areas.

One of the important advantages of this type of vessels is that, as they do not have a crew, they have a greater load capacity and can become very profitable economically. Many companies, as is the case of RFL, are already interested in knowing in depth what these ships imply with respect to conventional ones.

However, the reality today is that there is still a need for human supervision from land in this type of ships, so work continues on the development of connectivity and this is something that will continue to be done in the coming years. Countries such as Norway, Finland, China or Japan are some of those researching the development of MASS on the road to maritime automation.

Today it is still too early to predict the real impact these ships will have on the freight transport sector, but it is true that there is already talk of the great potential that a new fully digitised and sustainable system would represent.

Degrees of autonomy

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) speaks of four degrees of autonomy for these new-generation ships:

When the ship can have automated processes and decision support.
The case in which the ship is remotely controlled with professionals on board.
Situation of remote control without anyone inside the ship.
The situation where there is greater autonomy: the operating system of the ship that can make decisions and determine for itself what actions should be taken.

Cyberattacks

However, autonomous vessels can be very vulnerable to a possible cyberattack, one of the challenges to be addressed today. The consequences of this type of attack are, fundamentally, the economic losses resulting from the collapse of processes and services, as well as the deterioration of the reputation or reliability of the company.