Rise of the Machines at Sea: The British firm building robot boats As the pace of automation gathers speed – from the Internet of Things to factory floors – there's a lot going on quietly but efficiently in robot boats, in particular, with Portchester-based ASV Global. Founded in 1998 "as an idea", ASV – which stands for Autonomous Surface Vehicles – took off in 2007 after winning a research …
"“What they'd normally do is use a large 100-metre ship to do that which costs anything up to $150,000 dollars a day, doing a very low-value task,” said Cowles. “Essential, but low-value. If you can do two things simultaneously, tracing those transponders and also positioning them at the same time, you can save a lot of money.”
The gain here doesn't seem to be anything to do with having an autonomous boat, and simply down to having a small boat working at the same time as the big one. You could achieve exactly the same benefits by just having a normal boat with a person in it. The robo-boat may not need a salary, but it costs more for R&D, maintenance, and so on. There are no doubt plenty of areas where autonomous or semi-autonomous boats are great, but this really doesn't seem to be a good example of one.
This again. The bandying about of the term 'AI' like it's either here or due next year is rife on tech sites now. Pattern recognition and pathfinding is not AI for fuck's sake.
Anyway. These look like they would be very handy for drug smuggling assuming they're small enough to avoid radar detection.
It could be a limited AI, which is not the same as Strong AI, General AI or Artificial Sentience or Consciousness.
Intelligence is generally described as the ability to perceive information, and retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviours within an environment or context. Whilst there are other definitions of intelligence, there is no problem in using 'AI' to describe some existing problem solving machines.
>Pattern recognition and pathfinding is not AI for fuck's sake.
Not individually, but how the boat reacts to these inputs (along with weather forecasts, goals, local sensors etc) could be. The article is a bit scant on details, but it seems ASV's work parallels that of autonomous cars, which are classed as AI.
I'm not sure that anything boat-sized can avoid radar detection when they're actively looking for you. In WW-II, the U-Boat periscopes could be detected with radar (RAF Mk II Airborne Interception radar, and later the H2S radar). Radar has only gotten better since then.
The only advantage would be that being an unmanned vessel, the smugglers would not be at risk at high sea. They would only be picked up when the vessel got to its destination, tracked by the Coast Guard and the Navy.
Ballistic missile and hunter killer submarines work on the premise that it is difficult to find a boat in the vastness of the oceans, but that is all about to change with this technology because submarine ports aren’t vast.
Once you’ve found a sub, it is cheaper to drop a small roboat on the surface to track it where ever it moves. Doesn’t need any weapons because you rarely need to actually sink subs and that bit is easy when you know where they are. When the price drops, you can just drop a ring of roboats around the ports to pick up subs when they leave port.
Expect to see stories about lots of ocean mapping in the south China Sea
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/us_military_drone_submarine_hunter/
DARPA have gone with one 140 ton boat, instead of a herd of smaller ones. I don't know enough to know why... maybe one big powerful sonar system is better than several smaller ones. Maybe it just has a greater range (drag is proportional to cross section, a square power, whereas fuel capacity is proportional to volume, a cube power). Maybe they thought they'd build and test one prototype before making a few more.
My assumption would be that a team of several sensor platforms would offer greater performance than the sum of its elements, since having distance between the sensors allows for triangulation of signals. But hey, I'm not a weapon designer, dolphin or acoustic engineer. :)
"Once you’ve found a sub, it is cheaper to drop a small roboat on the surface to track it where ever it moves. Doesn’t need any weapons because you rarely need to actually sink subs and that bit is easy when you know where they are. When the price drops, you can just drop a ring of roboats around the ports to pick up subs when they leave port."
You may have noticed in the story on the £800m MoD business incubator that BAE and Birmingham U have developed a "Quantum Gravitmeter."
Such devices (pioneered by the late Dr Robert L. Forward at Hughes in the late 60's) can detect the gravity anomaly of a hand in front of them based on the difference between gravity in one direction and another.
So I'd guess the mass of a large ICBM submarine even at say a kilometre would still be quite detectable.
>So I'd guess the mass of a large ICBM submarine even at say a kilometre would still be quite detectable.
It would if the submarine hadn't displaced a volume of water of equal mass to itself. Gravimeters are used to detect underground hollows or other areas of low density.
Are you SURE it was unmanned? Perhaps Cap'n Rum was less visible than usual, as a result of having his legs sliced clean off by a falling sail, and swept into the sea before his very eyes...
http://allblackadderscripts.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/blackadder-ii-episde-3-potato.html
As someone who has pissed about building boats and fucking about with boats the idea of making them autonomous is, frankly, abhorrent. A boat needs human intervention to give them meaning and bring them to life.
You'll be trying to put them in the water next!
...are using an autonomous robot boat to track aircraft where land-based receivers can't.
M.
I'm concerned about Collision Regulations- Power gives way to Sail gives way to Fishing etc., so I assume roboboats would give way to everything.
But what day shape should they display? Some vessels have balls, some have diamonds up on display.
I suggest roboboats should have balls and something that looks like a cock up. Because there will be.
"m concerned about Collision Regulations- Power gives way to Sail gives way to Fishing etc., so I assume roboboats would give way to everything."
It's not quite that simple - there are various exceptions under the general heading of "vessel restricted in her ability to manoeuvre", and "In construing and complying with these rules due regard shall be had to all dangers of navigation and collision and to any special circumstances, including the limitations of the vessels involved, which may make a departure from these rules necessary to avoid immediate danger'.
In other words, if you are silly enough to sail your dinghy across the bows of a container ship you will probably a) get squashed, and b), be in legal trouble.
A few days ago there was a news article (in Dutch) on a lifesaving device to be used from a beach. They refer to it as a robot, but from the article it appears to be more like a remote controlled floatation device with some kind of propulsion system, able to reach 35km/h.
One might hope it has some proximity sensors too, and not rely solely on the operator being able to avoid ramming Emily squarely into the already distressed swimmer.
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