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Robo-Ships Will Carry Our Ikea Furniture Across the Melted Arctic

Automation and climate change are driving visions of future shipping.
Rolls-Royce's portrait of our drone ship future. Image: Rolls-Royce

As the shipping industry faces the end of a five-year downturn following the global economic collapse, a question remains: How can the titans of industry send goods around the world for less money? In the past, efficiency meant making ships bigger. But in the future, things get a bit more sci-fi.

According to a Bloomberg report, Rolls-Royce's marine division has begun testing a virtual reality bridge that may one day allow captains to navigate ships from on land, and without a crew aboard. That ties into a similar project being funded by the EU, called Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks, MUNIN. Add to that the fact that ships are navigating previously-frozen Arctic routes, more of which are expected to open up as the Arctic continues to melt, and you've got a portrait of the future in which drone ships carry the world's goods across defrosted seas.

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The world's economy floats on the back of massive cargo ships criss-crossing the globe. Nearly 9.2 billion tons of goods, from petroleum products to dry goods, were shipped around the world in 2012. That growth has been fueled by a massive increase in the size of the global fleet: According to World Ocean Review data, the capacity of the global cargo fleet grew from 644 million metric tons in 1985 to nearly 1200 metric tons in 2009. In simple terms, the shipping containers we all don't think twice about are the "'humble hero' of the global economy," as Al Jazeera put it.

And as shipping has grown, so have the ships. Last year, shipping giant Maersk unveiled its Triple-E class ship, which can carry 18,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU, the standard measure of how many cargo containers a ship can carry.) In 1996, the company's Regina Maersk class ships could carry just 7,100 TEU. Meanwhile, the world's most recent largest ship is expected to carry 3.6 million tonnes of liquid natural gas a year.

Giant ships or not, rising crew costs and the trend towards automation of jobs have got some folks in the industry wondering why ships aren't just turned into drones and sent on their merry way. Such a move would not only save in crew costs, but could mean redesigning ships to eliminate human comforts altogether, increasing efficiency.

“Now the technology is at the level where we can make this happen, and society is moving in this direction,” Oskar Levander, Rolls-Royce’s vice president of innovation in marine engineering and technology, told Bloomberg. “If we want marine to do this, now is the time to move.”

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Levander is pretty bullish on the idea, and has been making the rounds of financial publications in the last couple months. In an interview with FT last December, he said that automation "is happening in all the other industries so it is only logical that it should happen in marine."

he said the main sticking point is sorting out the myriad regulatory mazes that govern international shipping, which are not equipped yet to deal with robo-ships. “I think it will take more than 10 years before you have all the global rules in place, but you may have a local administration that is prepared to run [remote-controlled ships] sooner," he told FT.

Perhaps smoothing that transition is the argument that, like cars, shipping accidents are generally caused by human error. According to World Cargo News, the MUNIN program has found that "75% of accidents are caused by human error, of which a significant proportion can be attributed to 'fatigue and attention deficit.'"

Not everyone is stoked on the idea, and Bloomberg's report does a good job of rounding up criticism. While most agree that such work is technically feasible, the legal aspect—because international rules require minimum crew sizes, sailing an unmanned ship would be illegal today, preventing lines from getting insurance—is going to be a problem. Also, there's the possibility that drone ships don't save much money, as crew costs are only a fraction of operating expenses. (Some sources say about a third of operating expenses, Bloomberg's quoted analyst said 44 percent.)

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Rolls-Royce clearly thinks the savings are worth the development costs, and that's without counting a potential growth in shipping as the Arctic is unlocked. Look at the image above from a 2010 survey of shipping routes—there's not a single long route over the Arctic.

The above image from the National Academy of Sciences shows how things are expected to change by 2050: Routes across the Arctic, which help connect East Asia with Europe, will be straighter and more efficient than ever. Plus, a melted Arctic means more oil, which means an entire new hub for petroleum shipping. It's a win-win, unless you're the environment.

As with most things related to automation or climate change, we're still a few years off from truly drastic changes that put us into some sort of science fiction future where robotic ships carry goods from robotic factories to distribution islands around the world. But the fact that firms are seriously contemplating both drone ships and Arctic sailing routes is a reminder that the future isn't as distant as it may seem.