A smarter idea would be a fleet of automated ships following a flag carrier with the crew in it.

This way, the crew per ship could be reduced, as an engineer and even a captain cost would be divided between the ships. At the very least, the support for the crew would be more efficiently used , even if the direct crew pee ship don't get much reduced.

Moreover, the ships don't need to be of the same class or cargo, or even company: the centralized crew could be responsible for some container ships and grain ships. If needed, hand off between flag carriers could be done in open sea with a follower ship detaching from one fleet and attaching to other, packet network style.

Maybe, but I'm not sure that

a) there's a shipping need to move half a dozen cargo ships at the exact same time between two points

b) the handling capacity of the ports is such that you wouldn't be leaving half your fleet sitting around doing nothing for a few weeks while the other half gets unloaded/reloaded

It's really easy to look at a container ship and say, "autopilot has already been done, lets just apply that." I think the initial bit of getting the boat to drive between waypoints is a pretty easy problem, but once you put this boat out on the open ocean and something goes wrong, you're going to need some very serious fault handling, which means built-in redundancy and consideration for a huge number of possible failures. What happens when you catch RudderNotRespondingException("I tried to turn the rudder to 24.3 degrees and nothing happened.") Most likely you lost feedback, but maybe the rudder actually didn't turn to 24.3 degrees. When does the autopilot realize that it can't make it to the destination. Does the ship stop and wait for a tech to be helicoptered in to plug the rudder feedback cable back in?

Thats one of about 1000000 things that could go wrong that an experienced engineer would have little trouble diagnosing and fixing or working around, that are much more significant challenges for a computer making decisions. Just looking at the complexity of the engine room you can imagine all the possible points of failure, and the number of required contingency behaviors for the autopilot explodes when you start taking 2, 3, or more at a time.

Ultimately a ship is a system which is broadly similar to that of an aircraft. Everything's scaled up, but the basics - a means of propulsion, a control system, a navigation system - are very similar. We can make autonomous systems which are exceedingly reliable (satellites make it to 15, 20 years in orbit without failure or maintenence on a regular basis) and we've been operating large ships for long enough to have a good idea of where maintenence is required.

A ship's engine room may be larger than the engine of an aircraft, but the systems aren't more complicated. Proper maintenence procedures and redundancy where needed are already used in other systems. Why not ships?

"What about the captain? Out at sea a ship can basically go on a kind of autopilot today."

There is for sure a certain feel to boating. Although I have never obviously operated a boat of this size I have owned smaller boats and depending on sea conditions there is judgement in play that can't be offset by technology and especially an actual human with seat of the pants feel and judgement. That said it might be possible if the operator was literally in some kind of simulator and able to sense things in a similar way (although you wouldn't have smell or the feel of the air).

This idea though might cut it's teeth in a smaller area perhaps some kind of shuttle between two close ports as opposed to the open ocean or something like a water conveyor by ship.

> there is judgement in play that can't be offset by technology and especially an actual human with seat of the pants feel and judgement.

I thought the same thing at first, but I then I thought that a) These ships are too big and slow to be agile enough to respond to the kind of seat-of-the-pants type navigation I'm familiar with and, and b) I'm sure people said the same things about driverless cars.

I bet Spitfire era fighter pilots thought the same thing, before the advent to inherently unstable computer controlled fighters. And I suspect a bunch of modern fighter pilots think the same about removing the plot altogether. There's a similar significant benefit there too, remove the meat sack from a fighter jet, and all of a sudden 25g turns become acceptable - there's a lot of limitations on a fighter jet based on the requirement to keep a human being alive while "getting the job done".

Is that really true? This kind of "intuition" kills pilots of aircraft all the time. Part of learning to be a pilot is practicing the suppression of these feelings and trusting the equipment.

I would not be surprised that you can make engine so reliable that it basically never breaks and just need routine maintenance in ports. Also if you have two independent engines and one breaks, you can just use second engine to get to the closest port.

(I'm a 3rd Asst Engr. I just upgraded my license to 2nd, but I'm still sailing as a 3rd.)

Maintenance is staggered because there is only so much room for people to work in inside the engine room.

For most ships, it would be cheaper for the company to pay for the crew than lose out on shipping contracts due to being in port for maintenance.

Engineers can detect a lot of problems that machines can't, be it unusual smells, sounds, vibrations, temperatures, etc. Sure there are probes that can detect vibrations and temperatures, but they would have to be placed everywhere (not just the hundred or so usual spots), and then they have to be programmed. I use a handheld device to measure vibrations on running machinery. It's only as good as it's programming, and it's not that good.

Additionally, hoses burst, o-rings leak, filters need changing, etc. We don't have machines today that can fix those problems on the fly.

My last ship I was on was Diesel Electric. It was incredibly automated, yet still we had MAJOR problems because some circuit boards died.

> "Additionally, hoses burst, o-rings leak, filters need changing, etc. We don't have machines today that can fix those problems on the fly."

Lots of these things could be happening on airplanes but generally don't. Why can't we get airplane-level reliability on ships?

Probably because we aren't willing to pay airplane prices and do maintenance on airplane schedules. I suspect that a container ship usually takes longer to travel between two ports of call than an airplane is legally allowed to go between inspections.

They happen regularly! That's why you have checks between flights, no mater how short the flight. Daily, weekly, monthly and by cycles(flights) or hours maintenance. You have leaks, breakage, electronics get fried, conexions get loose. Aircraft parts are numbered and tracked they hace a limited live span depending the function. I can not imagine an airplane wirking properly and safely without all this care.

Airplanes have pretty low reliability - multiple maintenance man hours per flight hour. But their time in-transit, equivalent to time between ports for a ship, is measured in hours, not weeks.

One of my father's friends did maintenance on large bucket wheel excavators in the GDR. He told how they added sensors and electronics in the late 80s until the electronics failed as often as it helped, so humans remained indispensable -- if only to tell false positives from actual defects.

There seemed a clear point of marginal utility in automation.

A ship's power system is more complex than just one engine. Then add on the auxiliary systems (water filtration, sewer treatment, HVAC, etc) on top of that.Yes, much of it is automated, but what happens if a gasket leaks due to poor maintenance and suddenly you have to operate some part of the system manually?

That's why there's someone always on watch in the engine room.

Adding an automated backup to every system would be a considerable cost, and even then a manual option would be required and some-times relied upon.

(Former ship engineer.)

You do not need water filtration, sewer treatment and HVAC on fully automated ship - you can eliminate a lot of stuff that supports humans.

Good point, which seemed to completely escape me. Though many ships still would need auxiliary systems such as non-propulsion power, hydraulics, cargo cooling, inert gas systems, fresh cooling water, etc etc. Point is, it'll still be an immense system that is not so easy to fully and reliably automate.

Not to detract from your general point, but fresh water is used for more than just human consumption.

What about a tele-presence robot? A technician can just operate the robot and fix whatever needs to be fixed remotely.

I can't even replace an o-ring with gloves on, I cannot imagine the frustration of trying to do such a task with a tele-presence robot. I really don't think the technology for something like that is here yet.

The technology employed aboard ships is still tightly coupled with the processes used to maintain it (ie. Human ad-hoc intervention). If you want to automate the process, the first thing you'll think about is how to change that technology to make things easier for automation. Is it actually possible to turn a container ship into lego bricks which can be easily swapped out when broken, and can it be made hot swappable from the ship inside?

Imagine a car which would monitor each of its parts, diagnose an issue on the gearbox, and turn it offline while driving to replace it.

I think the tech is already here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_surgery. Though I am not sure if it going to be cost effective.

The grippers and tooling on robots like that (for example the "da vinci surgical robot") are way too specialized, and applied only to minimally invasive surgeries. So not something like that more like these robots :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek8GKqmJ7n0#t=70

the annoying thing with these robots is that you still have to specialize the hands,grippers, and tools for the task or group of tasks. We don't really have great "really general purpose" robotic manipulators, but we can make really good specialized robots for very well defined tasks, so I don't think the shipping industry is going to pay for an array of expensive special purpose robots. The technology is really not here yet, but getting ever closer, it's the holy grail of robotics and control systems research. Sorry for the ramble.

>Sorry for the ramble.

No ramble at all I found it useful, thanks for sharing it!

If there is real $ saving the technology will come sooner than later.

So why haven't they already done that and eliminated a 3rd of the on-board crew requirements?

The expensive part is to have crew (A/C, food, cook, doctor, etc) not to have one more person on the crew.