Unmanned container ships forecast to reshape industry

Karl Reinikainen, Special Correspondent and Dustin Braden, Assistant Web Editor | Jun 04, 2015 4:29PM EDT

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Unmanned cargo ship will usher in a whole new era in shipping, requiring a rethink of operations and business models in the industry, according to panelists at Nor-Shipping in Norway.

Unmanned ships will be able to carry more cargo than today's ships as they will not need a deckhouse and they will be cheaper to build because a range of equipment, from air conditioning to wastewater treatment, will not be required, according to Oskar Levander, VP for innovation and technology at Rolls-Royce Marine.Rolls-Royce is at the forefront of the effort to design unmanned ships. They are joined in the vanguard of that effort by a European Union project called Munin.

Levander said the entire design of the ships would have to be rethought once unmanned vessels became a reality. Business models will be affected too.

"Route optimisation of these ships would mean that day costs fall. Speeds would be optimized too, they would steam slower, so you would need more ships to optimize service frequency," Levander continued, referring to container vessels.

He pointed out that although it appears that the size of container ships is growing, this is no guarantee that future vessels will be as big. In the 1970s, several ultra-large crude carrier ships of more than 500,000 deadweight tonnage were built, but they did not become the benchmarks of crude carrier business. Today, a very-large crude carrier of about 300,000 deadweight tonnage sets that benchmark.

Martin Kits van Heyningen, CEO of KVH Industries, a manufacturer of satellite communication and navigation systems based in the U.S., said it’s unlikely that unmanned container vessels the size of the 18,400 twenty-foot-equivalent capacity Triple-E class of Maersk Line will be built. That is largely because of potential dangers during the transition from human-controlled to unmanned ships, Van Heyningen noted points of transformation were when the risk of accidents was highest, and used the aviation industry as an example.

Regulatory considerations are one of the primary hurdles unmanned ships must overcome, considering international maritime law sets minimum crew requirements for ships, and unmanned ships would be in violation of such statutes. It is also unclear how ships would be classified and insured in the era of automated shipping, according to GE. Unlike automated aircraft and cars, the issue of legality has not been deeply researched or discussed.

One of most in-depth studies on the matter was done by Eric Van Hooydonk, of the University of Ghent. He noted that in various national and international legal documents, the definition of a “ship,” does not mention a crew. This removes one barrier from having existing international law applied to unmanned vessels.

One of the largest barriers to automated shipping will be the relationship between the vessel and its flag state, Hooydonk said.  After evaluating the pertinent legal regulations, Hooydonk concluded that new international regulations will need to be crafted in order to delineate these relationships and responsibilities.

Although there are legal barriers to the use of unmanned vessels for international shipping, this will not slow the technology’s development. Unmanned technology is likely to be used first on short-haul domestic trades because regulatory approval will only be needed from a single state.