By the year 2025 Rolls-Royce, the company which separated from the car brands of the same name wants to launch its first uncrewed ocean-going vessels. To build it fully autonomous ship, the company has come into an agreement with Intel to help realize their vision.
The company has already taking some steps, by launching its Intelligent Awareness system for crewed vessels earlier this year
The Intelligent Awareness System processes data inputs from LIDAR, radar, thermal cameras, HD cameras, satellite data and weather forecasts. With all of this data, a ship can maintain awareness of its surroundings, detecting objects as far as several kilometers away.
As part of its new deal with Intel, Rolls-Royce will use the company’s 3D NAND solid-state drives to store the data from this network p to a TB of data a day, the system uses Intel Xeon Scalable processors on the ships themselves to run machine learning and inference workloads locally.
Most of the world's goods are hauled by cargo ships and Rolls-Royce believe that making this ships remote-controlled can improve safety and make fleets efficient.
“We’re delighted to sign this agreement with Intel and look forward to working together on developing exciting new technologies and products, which will play a big part in enabling the safe operation of autonomous ships,” said Kevin Daffey, director of engineering and technology and ship intelligence, in a statement. “This collaboration can help us to develop technology that supports ship owners in the automation of their navigation and operations, reducing the opportunity for human error and allowing crews to focus on more valuable tasks.”
