Factors Influencing the Economic Feasibility of Unmanned Ships

The research effort into unmanned and autonomous ships has increased significantly over the last decade. Although not all required technology is currently commercially available, consensus is that from a technical standpoint, unmanned shipping is possible. The next question is: is it economically feasible to operate an unmanned ship. The...

Towards unmanned cargo ships: A task based design process to identify economically viable low and unmanned ship concepts

Unmanned and low-manned transport has increasingly been studied this past decade. While there have been successful trials for autonomous navigation, unmanned cargo ships are not commercially available yet. First, this dissertation investigates how changes to a ship’s systems and organizational structure can affect the crew’s size and composition...

Identification of a task-based implementation path for unmanned autonomous ships

Autonomous and unmanned shipping are currently hot topics in the maritime industry. However, there are many different views on how the ultimate goal of an unmanned, autonomous ship will be reached. On any given ship, a large range of tasks is performed every day, each of which need to be replaced in such a way that no human presence is...

A task-based analysis of the economic viability of low-manned and unmanned cargo ship concepts

While successful trials for autonomously navigating ships have been conducted, commercially available unmanned cargo ships are currently unavailable. However, there are many solutions available that will allow for low-manned ship concepts long before fully unmanned ships are possible. There are many drivers for low-manned and unmanned...

VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change

Visual place recognition (VPR) is the process of recognising a previously visited place using visual information, often under varying appearance conditions and viewpoint changes and with computational constraints. VPR is related to the concepts of localisation, loop closure, image retrieval and is a critical component of many autonomous...

The effect of autonomous systems on the crew size of ships–a case study

Recently, autonomous ships have gotten a lot more attention both in the media and in research. However, very little research has focussed on the effects of automation on the size of the crew. This paper analyses the effects of added automation on the required size and composition of the crew on a 750 TEU short sea container vessel. A Crew...