Rolls-Royce & Intel Shake Hand For The Cooperation On Building Autonomous Ships

Rolls-Royce and Intel have recently announced their cooperation on design and manufacturer of an advanced intelligent shipping system. This would make the commercial shipping become safer and more effective.

This could be considered as a smart move of these two companies in the scene that people is trying to apply intelligent systems in almost every field due to its variety of benefits and shipping industry has been known as a multi-billion dollar one without the regular intervention of modern technology. Our current shipping still depends mostly on the human power for several operations’ parts.

Rolls-Royce has maintained their leading position in the manufacturing field for two centuries and currently offered different services including ships manufacturer. While Intel has recently focused on autonomous driving, storage, computing and network technologies since 2016.

The Goal

The main purpose of this design is to establish the technological solutions to the shipping industry. The data-directed systems used for ships, mechanic, cargo owners, and the ports will work with the same mechanism applied in autonomous cars and smart cities.

The artificial intelligence (AI) and a dedicated info center will be integrated into this intelligent system. By using this technology, instead of sending someone to observe and run around to report the issues or attack, the system could manage navigation, detect the obstacles and improve the communication method.

Tools

According to the announcement, three main components including designing platform, processor and memory have been presented:

• Intel® Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology will bring to engineers such a flexible platform, the IP and components to support obstacle detection and navigation management.
• Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors will manage the complicated ship functions’ models and future developments shall apply the learning models to the whole autonomous operations.   
• Intel® Optane™ SSD Intel® 3D NAND will accommodate the system with enough essential memory and storage space to make sure that this intelligent system are reliable and responsive. In addition, it also helps to extract values from the data which has been produced by real-time analysis at the maximum level.

Limitations

We could not deny the benefits of these autonomous systems, however, if we think more about the possibilities, the story may not be the same.

Imagine you meet a storm during the trip, or get attacked by the pirate, will the autonomous systems show their capabilities to prevent the ship from moving directly forward to the hazards when they come?