Talking Autonomous Vessels

Talking Autonomous Vessels

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The United States Navy has been at work the past few years pushing the development of Unmanned Surface Vehicles, such as the Sea Hunter. The Navy is making an effort to convert several of the service’s ships into unmanned vessels. As USV technologies develop, unmanned ships seem to be the future of maritime warfare. However there are still problems with operating unmanned ships, mainly the fact that these unmanned vessels share the seas with other civilian manned ships and sometimes ships require to communicate with each other in order to get through congested waterways safely.

The problem with communicating with an unmanned ship is that there is nobody onboard to communicate with. Because of this the United States Navy is looking to develop technology that would make USVs understand human radio chatter, as well as talk with other nearby manned ships.

Even though they are military, unmanned ship, the United States Navy still needs its vessels to abide to the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS). COLREGS instructions for preventing collisions mainly involve requiring two ships to verbally interact with each other, something that autonomous vehicles have a hard time doing.

The Navy has issued a request for a three-phase development process according to Newatlas.com. The first phase of development will be to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept. Robotic systems will need to be able to understand common calls such as “Sea Hunter from One Piece, propose a port-to-port passage”.

The second phase will include adding a VHF radio capability and understanding English went spoken in foreign accents.

The final phase of the project will involve integrating the entire effort to develop a usable system to be deployed on the Navy’s unmanned vessels.

Popularmechanics.com mentions the United States Navy is planning to add ten new large unmanned warships over the next decade. The vessels will act as scouts for other ships. The ships carry sensors such as radar and sonar to scout ahead for other enemy ships and submarines. As of now, the United States Congress has prohibited the use of weapons on unmanned Naval ships, however it is possible that one day these USVs will also operate weapon systems.