self driving yacht

The unsinkable potential of autonomous boats

Autonomous boats are now crossing oceans.

by Rebecca Heilweil

An autonomous boat, a small white vessel with no humans aboard, is next to a dock. There is a nearby boat,

The Mayflower Autonomous Ship finally arrived on the coast of Nova Scotia last month , marking the end of its long trek across the Atlantic. While the modern Mayflower is far from the first vessel to make that voyage, this small robotic boat is the largest to ever do so navigated by artificial intelligence with no humans aboard. A few technical hiccups notwithstanding, its trip is the latest evidence that the future of the high seas could be autonomous.

Slowly, self-steering ships are becoming a reality. In Norway, an autonomous battery-powered container vessel is shuttling fertilizer between a factory and a local port, and pending a successful trial, it could be fully certified within the next two years. A commercial tanker called the Prism Courage recently traveled from Texas, through the Panama Canal, to South Korea, guided by software from Avikus, a subsidiary of HD Hyundai, a shipbuilding operation that was spun off of the car group . There are even some boats meant to transport humans that can now operate on their own: A self-driving water taxi created by the artificial intelligence startup Buffalo Automation was ready to ferry people across the Tennessee River in downtown Knoxville, at least as of April .

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Not all robo-boats are created equal. Some current AI sailing software is assistive, and requires at least some form of monitoring from a person onboard, while more advanced technology can operate a ship entirely independently, without any need for humans. Regardless, this new generation of autonomous vessels stands to make people a more marginal part of life at sea. Because many self-steering boats are still relatively new, there’s not yet enough evidence to prove that the technology that powers these ships is as capable as human navigators. Still, these vehicles could not only make it easier to traverse the world’s waterways, but also do so with a smaller carbon footprint than crewed boats.

“A computer can be optimizing for fuel savings and integrating a lot of different inputs around how fast they need to be moving through the water to reach their destination on time, what the weather conditions are like, how the vessel is operating, [and] how the engines are operating,” Trevor Vieweg, the chief technology officer at Sea Machines Robotics, a startup that designs self-driving boat tech, told Recode. “By using those same technologies, we can reduce carbon emissions — and fuel burn overall.”

To navigate independently, an autonomous boat typically needs a wide variety of sensors, including cameras and radar, as well as data from other sources, like GPS. These sensors are positioned around the vessel, and help a ship plan its route and sense nearby obstacles, like, for example, a floating log or a chunk of an iceberg. As with self-driving cars, autonomous ships can be classified into several levels based on how well their tech can perform without human help. The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency that regulates shipping, has proposed a spectrum of autonomy starting with Level 1 ships, which would be operated by humans but might allow AI to make some unsupervised decisions, and ramping up in sophistication to Level 4 ships that could sail completely independently, with no human involvement or decision-making required.

Advocates say these ships are less susceptible to human error — ship and boat accidents are somewhat common — and could allow boat operators to assign workers to other tasks where they can be more productive. Artificial intelligence could also navigate ships more efficiently , and make better calculations about routes and speeds. The hope is that by saving time and, perhaps most importantly, fuel, ocean vessels can cut down on their energy consumption, which remains a significant contributor to climate change. In the absence of full autonomy, some experts have even suggested that software could enable humans to steer boats remotely, which would come with several benefits. For instance, remotely piloted ships would reduce the risk of spreading illness through international cargo transport, which has been a concern throughout the Covid-19 pandemic .

Right now, ships with autonomous capabilities represent a tiny fraction of the many vessels in operation today. But in the future, self-steering ships could make all sorts of water-based activities more convenient. For example, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, which was supported in part by IBM, was designed to study the ocean’s health, record audio of marine life, and take samples of microplastic. The boat doesn’t include a deck, bathrooms, or bunks, and much of the space inside is occupied by its technology, like its onboard computers, batteries, and motors.

“Not having humans on board frees up/eliminates the space occupied by them and supplies necessary to sustain human presence, as well as the power that the ship requires to carry the weight entailed,” said Ayse Atauz Phaneuf, the president of ProMare, the marine research organization that worked on the project. “Unmanned vehicles such as the Mayflower Autonomous Project will be able to spend considerably longer time at sea, accessing significant yet distant parts of the ocean.”

Phaneuf told Recode that the vehicle, and others like it, could eventually make ocean research expeditions much less expensive to launch. In addition to making it easier to study the ocean, autonomous ships could also make it more convenient to transport freight. In Japan, a partnership between a non-profit and freight transportation companies successfully showed earlier this year that autonomous container ships could travel between ports throughout the country. The demonstration was meant to prove that these vehicles could eventually help cut down on the shipping industry’s need for workers , especially as Japan confronts an aging population . There are also organizations like One Sea, which has brought together shipping and AI companies to promote autonomous ocean transportation, and to advance the technology involved.

There are those environmental benefits, too. HD Hyundai’s navigation tech works by using artificial intelligence to determine a ship’s routes and speeds, and the software also factors in the height of nearby waves and the behavior of neighboring vessels. The company says by using this AI, the Prism Courage — the commercial tanker that traveled through the Panama Canal — boosted its fuel efficiency by about 7 percent, and cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent. While that might not sound like a lot, those savings could add up quickly.

Autonomous ships do face headwinds. One industry expert we spoke to said that smaller boats, like survey vessels and ferries, are more likely to incorporate autonomous technology than the large, container ships that make up the bulk of the world’s freight transportation. Some critics, including Maersk’s CEO, have argued that the savings that might come from autonomous software may not be enough to incentivize large shipping companies to invest in the tech, especially since many ocean carriers don’t use particularly large crews in the first place (a typical cargo ship might have just 20 workers aboard ). Another concern is that autonomous software could make these ships more vulnerable to cyberattacks, though non-autonomous shipping operations have already been hacked.

And finally, there’s also the extremely complicated matter of international maritime law, which may not be prepared for the arrival of artificial intelligence.

“How should we deal with the liability issue where an autonomous system, although properly designed and maintained, acts unpredictably?” Melis Ozdel, the director of the University College London Centre for Commercial Law, told Recode. Of course, there are many ways autonomous vessels could upend life at sea, whether it’s the possibility of a robo-boat crashing into a cruise full of tourists, or the uncertain fate of pirates who might capture a ship, only to discover that it’s actually remote-controlled.

AI ships have already shown they can work, at least sometimes, though the technology that powers these vessels is still being developed and may require years to fully take off. Still, all signs indicate that these next-generation boats do have advantages. Eventually, sailing might look a little less like weeks out at sea and a little more like monitoring a ship from the comfort of an office, conveniently located on land.

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

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The World’s First Self-Docking Boat

By Lois Parshley
Updated: December 8, 2020

The sun glinted off the water in Gothenburg, Sweden, as Volvo Penta’s self-docking yacht backed slowly toward a waiting crowd.

The lustrous leather steering wheel spun all on its own. Nervous sailors leaned over from the decks of the neighboring Volvo Ocean 65 boats as the 68-foot yacht approached the narrow slot. This stopover of the around-the-world sailboat race was the unveiling of a long-awaited system in modern boating—full autonomy.

While autopilot has been available in boats for ages, Volvo’s new docking system moves beyond that. It’s a big step toward true self-driving boats. While cars can be expected to primarily move forward down a road, autonomy in boats is more complex because they have to be able to move in multiple directions. What’s more, for a boat, the road is moving. The yacht uses the joystick-controlled Volvo Penta Inboard Performance System (IPS), which was first sold in 2006. The company later introduced the Dynamic Positioning System, which uses individual drives to automatically preserve a boat’s heading and position, even during strong winds or tides. The self-docking yacht incorporates both of these systems into an onboard electronic vessel control system, which maneuvers the steering according to the boat’s actual position.

When the boat arrives in a predefined “catch zone,” it alerts the captain that it’s ready to activate the self-docking function. Once initiated, the boat relies on GPS to move close to the berth, and waits for the captain to enable the final stage, which utilizes both GPS and local sensors on both the boat and in the berth to define the docking space. The boat can then automatically safely guide itself to shore.

“Docking is one of the most challenging boat-handling maneuvers,” says Björn Ingemanson, president of Volvo Penta, who explains that the company hopes to make the process easier and safer.

The self-driving prototype was developed in just a matter of months. “This was an expected next step from Volvo Penta,” says Johan Inden, chief technology officer at Volvo Penta, but it was also a change in strategy. “We’re throwing ourselves out there with future ideas,” he says. Inden sees many potential future applications of autonomy, from autopilots docking larger ships on the commercial side to improving boater safety in dangerous conditions.

Volvo Penta anticipates the technology will be available by 2020. Volvo aims to develop the system so that it can be retrofitted to boats already rigged with an IPS system. But Volvo doesn’t plan on stopping there. Anders Thornin, manager of product planning for electronics at Volvo Penta, forecasts a boat capable of completely driving itself from point A to point B is less than five years away. “We’ve shown the technical capacity in a specific situation, but we will continue to learn more about what else we can do,” he says.

Back in Sweden, the yacht’s engines purred through a crosswind as it crept toward a dock with no help from human hands. The captain did look alarmed when an oblivious PWC rider roared directly behind the yacht, but it wasn’t even a close call. Eventually, the system will include anti-collision alerts too. Watching as the yacht eased the final feet into the berth with a gentle sway, Inden said: “Someday soon, you’ll be able to call for your boat and have it come pick you up. Fifteen years ago, technology was the hurdle. Now we’re only constrained by imagination.”

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Autonomous boats could be your next ride

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Close-up photo of the MIT autonomous boat Roboat II

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The feverish race to produce the shiniest, safest, speediest self-driving car has spilled over into our wheelchairs, scooters, and even golf carts. Recently, there’s been movement from land to sea, as marine autonomy stands to change the canals of our cities, with the potential to deliver goods and services and collect waste across our waterways.

In an update to a five-year project from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab, researchers have been developing the world's first fleet of autonomous boats for the City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and have recently added a new, larger vessel to the group: “Roboat II.” Now sitting at 2 meters long, which is roughly a “Covid-friendly” 6 feet, the new robotic boat is capable of carrying passengers.

This work was supported by grant from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) in Netherlands.

Alongside the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions , the team also created navigation and control algorithms to update the communication and collaboration among the boats.

“Roboat II navigates autonomously using algorithms similar to those used by self-driving cars, but now adapted for water,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, a senior author on a new paper about Roboat and the director of CSAIL. “We’re developing fleets of Roboats that can deliver people and goods, and connect with other Roboats to form a range of autonomous platforms to enable water activities.”

Self-driving boats have been able to transport small items for years, but adding human passengers has felt somewhat intangible due to the current size of the vessels. Roboat II is the “half-scale” boat in the growing body of work, and joins the previously developed quarter-scale Roboat, which is 1 meter long. The third installment, which is under construction in Amsterdam and is considered to be “full scale,” is 4 meters long and aims to carry anywhere from four to six passengers.

Aided by powerful algorithms, Roboat II autonomously navigated the canals of Amsterdam for three hours collecting data, and returned back to its start location with an error margin of only 0.17 meters, or fewer than 7 inches.

“The development of an autonomous boat system capable of accurate mapping, robust control, and human transport is a crucial step towards having the system implemented in the full-scale Roboat,” says senior postdoc Wei Wang, lead author on a new paper about Roboat II. “We also hope it will eventually be implemented in other boats in order to make them autonomous.”

Wang wrote the paper alongside MIT Senseable City Lab postdoc Tixiao Shan, research fellow Pietro Leoni, postdoc David Fernandez-Gutierrez, research fellow Drew Meyers, and MIT professors Carlo Ratti and Daniela Rus. The work was supported by a grant from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions in the Netherlands. A paper on Roboat II will be virtually presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

To coordinate communication among the boats, another team from MIT CSAIL and Senseable City Lab, also led by Wang, came up with a new control strategy for robot coordination.

With the intent of self-assembling into connected, multi-unit trains — with distant homage to children’s train sets — “collective transport” takes a different path to complete various tasks. The system uses a distributed controller, which is a collection of sensors, controllers, and associated computers distributed throughout a system), and a strategy inspired by how a colony of ants can transport food without communication. Specifically, there’s no direct communication among the connected robots — only one leader knows the destination. The leader initiates movement to the destination, and then the other robots can estimate the intention of the leader, and align their movements accordingly.

“Current cooperative algorithms have rarely considered dynamic systems on the water,” says Ratti, the Senseable City Lab director. “Cooperative transport, using a team of water vehicles, poses unique challenges not encountered in aerial or ground vehicles. For example, inertia and load of the vehicles become more significant factors that make the system harder to control. Our study investigates the cooperative control of the surface vehicles and validates the algorithm on that.”

The team tested their control method on two scenarios: one where three robots are connected in a series, and another where three robots are connected in parallel. The results showed that the coordinated group was able to track various trajectories and orientations in both configurations, and that the magnitudes of the followers’ forces positively contributed to the group — indicating that the follower robots helped the leader.

Wang wrote a paper about collective transport alongside Stanford University PhD student Zijian Wang, MIT postdoc Luis Mateos, MIT researcher Kuan Wei Huang, Stanford Assistant Professor Mac Schwager, Ratti, and Rus.

In 2016, MIT researchers tested a prototype that could move “forward, backward, and laterally along a pre-programmed path in the canals.” Three years later, the team’s robots were updated to “shapeshift” by autonomously disconnecting and reassembling into a variety of configurations.

Now, Roboat II has scaled up to explore transportation tasks, aided by updated research. These include a new algorithm for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), a model-based optimal controller called nonlinear model predictive controller, and an optimization-based state estimator, called moving horizon estimation.

Here’s how it works: When a passenger pickup task is required from a user at a specific position, the system coordinator will assign the task to an unoccupied boat that’s closest to the passenger. As Roboat II picks up the passenger, it will create a feasible path to the desired destination, based on the current traffic conditions.

Then, Roboat II, which weighs more than 50 kilograms, will start to localize itself by running the SLAM algorithm and utilizing lidar and GPS sensors, as well as an inertial measurement unit for localization, pose, and velocity. The controller then tracks the reference trajectories from the planner, which updates the path to avoid obstacles that are detected to avoid potential collisions.

The team notes that the improvements in their control algorithms have made the obstacles feel like less of a giant iceberg since their last update; the SLAM algorithm provides a higher localization accuracy for Roboat, and allows for online mapping during navigation, which they didn’t have in previous iterations.

Increasing the size of Roboat also required a larger area to conduct the experiments, which began in the MIT pools and subsequently moved to the Charles River, which cuts through Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While navigating the congested roads of cities alike can lead drivers to feel trapped in a maze, canals largely avoid this. Nevertheless, tricky scenarios in the waterways can still emerge. Given that, the team is working on developing more efficient planning algorithms to let the vessel handle more complicated scenarios, by applying active object detection and identification to improve Roboat’s understanding of its environment. The team plans to estimate disturbances such as currents and waves, to further improve the tracking performance in more noisy waters.

“All of these expected developments will be incorporated into the first prototype of the full-scale Roboat and tested in the canals of the City of Amsterdam,” says Rus.

Collective transport

Making our intuitive abilities a reality for machines has been the persistent intention since the birth of the field, from straightforward commands for picking up items to the nuances of organizing in a group.

One of the main goals of the project is enabling self-assembly to complete the aforementioned tasks of collecting waste, delivering items, and transporting people in the canals — but controlling this movement on the water has been a challenging obstacle. Communication in robotics can often be unstable or have delays, which may worsen the robot coordination.

Many control algorithms for this collective transport require direct communication, the relative positions in the group, and the destination of the task — but the team’s new algorithm simply needs one robot to know the desired trajectory and orientation.

Normally, the distributed controller running on each robot requires the velocity information of the connected structure (represented by the velocity of the center of the structure), but this requires that each robot knows the relative position to the center of the structure. In the team’s algorithm, they don’t need the relative position, and each robot simply uses its local velocity instead of the velocity of the center of the structure.

When the leader initiates the movement to the destination, the other robots can therefore estimate the intention of the leader and align their movements. The leader can also steer the rest of the robots by adjusting its input, without any communication between any two robots.

In the future, the team plans to use machine learning to estimate (online) the key parameters of the robots. They’re also aiming to explore adaptive controllers that allow for dynamic change to the structure when objects are placed on the boat. Eventually, the boats will also be extended to outdoor water environments, where large disturbances such as currents and waves exist.

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An electric, autonomous boat developed by MIT researchers is being tested in the canals of Amsterdam as part of an effort to ease traffic, reports Aleksandar Furtula and Mike Corder for the AP. The Roboat project is aimed at developing “new ways of navigating the world’s waterways without a human hand at the wheel,” write Furtula and Corder. “The vessels are modular so they can be easily adapted for different purposes, carrying cargo or workers.”

Popular Mechanics

MIT researchers have unveiled a new autonomous modular boat, called the Roboat II, which that uses lidar, GPS and other sensors to navigate its surroundings, reports Kyro Mitchell for Popular Mechanics . The Roboat II “can attach itself to other Roboat II’s to form one large vessel, which is then controlled by a main ‘leader’ boat.”

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MIT’s fleet of autonomous boats can now shapeshift

MIT researchers have given their fleet of autonomous “roboats” the ability to automatically target and clasp onto each other — and keep trying if they fail. The roboats are being designed to transport people, collect trash, and self-assemble into floating structures in the canals of Amsterdam.

Autonomous boats can target and latch onto each other

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab have designed a fleet of autonomous boats that offer high maneuverability and precise control.

Fleet of autonomous boats could service some cities, reducing road traffic

ROBOAT, a new collaboration between researchers from MIT and partner institutions in the Netherlands, seeks to design and deploy a fleet of autonomous boats on the canals of Amsterdam.

An autonomous fleet for Amsterdam

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Autonomous boats: The rise of self-sailing vessels

April 22, 2021

Sam Fortescue reports on the latest developments in autonomous boats and self-sailing technology, which is ready to be deployed in a variety of uses from weather monitoring to shipping

‘Vessel not under command’ looks set to take on a new meaning, with the race to develop a new generation of autonomous boats sailed by artificial intelligence (AI). But what will it mean for other water users?

Today we’re all familiar with the concept of autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars are the next development frontier, and the tools needed to make them a reality are being intensively tested by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech firms.

Less well known is the similar trajectory being followed in the marine industry. So-called unmanned autonomous vehicles, or marine drones, are attracting research interest from everyone from backyard inventors up to engineering behemoths like Rolls-Royce.

They come in all shapes and sizes, with intended purposes varying from meteorology and oceanology, to cargo, surveillance and defence. From the outside, some resemble normal sailing multihulls.

You might never realise there is no human aboard Artemis Technologies’ self-sailing cat, for example, with its 50-knot top speed. The Belfast-based company has based its design for a 45m-long Autonomous Sailing Vehicle (ASV) on technology developed for the 2017 America’s Cup.

Artemis Technologies’ autonomous boat design is based on the 2017 America’s Cup catamaran. Photo: Artemis Technologies

With two fixed wing sails, the catamaran rises up on four foils and hits top speed in just 20 knots of wind. Regenerating propellers on two of the foils charge a large battery bank on board, and that harvesting of energy brings the boat speed back down to 30 knots.

In lighter 8-knot winds, the boat still foils at 20 knots, and electric motors spin propellers that bump the speed back up to its optimum 30 knots. Artemis believes it can be used as a constant-speed commercial vessel for delivering cargo.

Meanwhile, in Plymouth, a consortium including IBM is testing a new Mayflower, a 15m power trimaran studded with solar panels, that should be capable of operating independently for months at a time. It has a top speed of 10 knots achieved with an electric motor drawing power from batteries topped up by solar.

The purpose of the boat is to collect oceanographic data, with sensors on board collecting information on marine mammals, ocean plastics, sea-level mapping and maritime cybersecurity.

See and avoid

The sheer size of some autonomous boats, and the astonishing speed of Artemis’s ASV, highlights the need for safe navigation. Such vessels carry a plethora of collision avoidance systems. While AIS technology has revolutionised collision avoidance over the last decade, it is not universally adopted among fishing vessels or yachts.

Inshore, where marine traffic is at its most dense, many dayboats will lack even a radar reflector. Other solutions, therefore, were required.

Mayflower, computing giant IBM’s autonomous vessel. The 15m boat is scheduled for a maiden voyage Atlantic crossing in April 2021. Photo: Tom Barnes

On Mayflower , computing giant IBM has installed its PowerAI Vision technology to crunch the inputs from onboard cameras that use both normal and infrared light.

In the development phase, so-called ‘deep learning’ is enabling the computer to spot navigational hazards from buoys to floating debris.

This complements radar and laser range-finding to help the boat’s software decide on the best tactic for avoidance. “We’re testing the system, but it is designed to be COLREG compliant and should spot things as small as a man in a rowboat and be able to avoid it,” said Brett Phaneuf, co-director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project.

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“It is programmed to detect and identify all manner of marine objects from many types of ships and boats, to buoys and kayakers. It understands how they behave and can predict movement and act to navigate in and around them.”

In principle there’s no limit to the number of objects it can track. But in the greatest traffic areas inshore, there will be a high bandwidth data link which will enable a human to step in to make decisions for the Mayflower if necessary. “There will always be a low-bandwidth satellite connection so that we may assist the vessel should it ask for help. Its prime directive is ‘don’t hit anything’,” added Phaneuf.

The maiden voyage has been postponed until mid-April 2021, when Mayflower will attempt to become one of the first full-sized autonomous ships to cross the Atlantic. Once the technology is proven, it has myriad potential uses.

Autonomous technology means a single landbased captain could eventually be in command of thousands of tonnes of shipping all around the world. Photo: Rolls-Royce

The race is on to develop commercial vessels with no humans aboard, only remote oversight from someone in a control room keeping an eye on dozens of vast container ships. Rolls-Royce was looking into just this before it sold its marine division to rival Kongsberg.

The company believes the first steps towards using remote-controlled coastal ships will be taken in the middle of this decade, with fully autonomous vessels coming at least 10 years after that. “Autonomous shipping is the future of the maritime industry,” explained Mikael Mäkinen, former president of Rolls-Royce’s marine division. “As disruptive as the smartphone, the smart ship will revolutionise the landscape of ship design and operations.”

The military, too, hope to use the technology to remove vulnerable humans from tedious or dangerous frontline duties, including surveillance. The Royal Navy has earmarked £184m to develop crewless minehunters.

The US Navy has already completed a trial that saw one of its Ghost Fleet Overlord vessels navigate from the Gulf Coast to California through the Panama Canal without incident.

“During this voyage, the vessel travelled over 4,700 miles, 97% of which was in autonomous mode – a record for the program,” reported Josh Frey, spokesman at the Department of Defense.

Small scale autonomous boats

There is also a growing fleet of smaller autonomous craft that can gather a wide range of data. These include the Wave Glider from Liquid Robotics, a 3.05m craft that generates power to operate from 192W of solar panels and a submarine element that harvests wave motion.

As it weighs 155kg and moves at 1.3 knots, the Liquid Robotics team doesn’t consider it to be a navigational hazard. “The Wave Glider is very small and therefore is the one who needs to get out of the way of any other boats,” marketing director Leigh Martins told me. “So, our software uses AIS for vessel detection and avoidance to stay safe.”

Submarine propulsion element of the Wave Glider. Photo: Wave Glider

Two craft closely resembling the Wave Glider were discovered washed up on the Scottish coast without their trailing submarine elements.

Meanwhile, the Sailbuoy under development by the Norwegian firm Offshore Sensing is designed to glance away from collisions.

It measures 2m and weighs 60kg, and its sole means of avoiding collisions are the words ‘Keep Clear’ stencilled onto the balanced wingsail that propels it. “Our solution to this is to make it withstand collisions on the open ocean,” explained CEO David Peddie. “A small vessel like the Sailbuoy does not present any danger to other traffic.”

The company’s website features a video of the Sailbuoy being run down by a small freighter during testing, then righting itself thanks to its heavy keel before bobbing clear.

Sailbuoy is designed to glance away from collisions. Photo: Sailbuoy

These craft are designed to survey their environment, and can hold station like a buoy or travel slowly along a predetermined route.

It has proven a robust approach: Sailbuoy became the first autonomous sailing vessel to successfully cross the Atlantic in the World Robotic Sailing Championship last year.

Saildrone takes a different approach for their autonomous boats. Its Explorer vehicle is larger – 7m LOA, with a 2.5m draught and a displacement of 0.75 tonnes. At this scale, a more robust approach to collision avoidance is required.

While it also uses AIS to spot other vessels at sea, each Saildrone is constantly under the supervision of a human back at mission control in Alameda, California.

Saildrone has also scaled their design up to a hefty 72ft ‘unmanned surface vehicle’. The Surveyor is equipped with deep-sea surveying equipment capable of scanning down to around 7,000m depth, and has an air draught of 18m.

Like its smaller cousins, there is a human in remote control of the boat at all times, to avoid collisions. But Surveyor also bristles with cameras, images crunched by an onboard processor to identify other vessels.

The company plans to put a fleet of 1,000 USVs onto the world’s oceans for a range of missions, from weather monitoring and gathering oceanographic data to patrolling border waters for smuggling and illegal fishing.

Weather spies

One of the most exciting features for sailors will be the real-time weather information autonomous boats can deliver.

Trimtab-controlled wingsail on Saildrone. Photo: Patrick Rousseaux Jenn Virskus/Saildrone

Saildrone founder Richard Jenkins grew up sailing in the Solent, and his company supplied a super-detailed forecast for Cowes Week in 2019, based on publicly available predictions enhanced with ‘secret’ local measurements taken by a Saildrone.

The result was a forecast with a high 200m resolution. In the end the uses for autonomous boats will be as myriad as those for satellites but, as with any new technology, there can be dangers, warns Luc Jaulet, robotics professor at France’s ENSTA engineering school, which is developing the Vaimos autonomous vessel.

As the concept becomes commonplace, the world will have to create suitable rules to keep the oceans safe. “The technology is basically ready, we just have to work out the legislation and then invest in it,” says Professor Jaulet.

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Forget Robo-Cars and Hit the Water on an Autonomous Boat

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Despite many developers’ efforts to teach cars to steer themselves around roads filled with human drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists, the first great wave of autonomous vehicles may not arrive on land. Instead, it might follow the time-honored tradition of running away from tricky problems by heading for the open seas.

Rather than worrying about robo-taxis , groups around the world are working on making ships—large and small—self-piloting, which could save fuel, prevent expensive accidents and groundings, and relieve crews of some of mundanity of life on the water.

Let’s start at the big end of the scale. Container ships and other behemoths may not have to deal with rogue scooters, but they come with their own challenges. Stopping or turning can take miles, so decisions have to be made early, and correctly. Tesla might hope just eight cameras is enough to see its surroundings, but a 1000-foot-long vessel needs hundreds. That requires a serious upgrade in computing power: Four of those cameras can generate 3 terabytes of data a month. So robo-ships don’t have trunks packed with computers. They have server rooms.

The good news is that adding even a few hundred cameras won’t much change the price of a ship that costs millions of dollars, and even the modest investment should pay off. “Six to seven percent of operating costs is crew,” says Thiru Vikram, the CEO of Buffalo Automation. “Eighty percent of accidents are caused by human error, or fatigue, so we can bring down insurance costs, save fuel, and reduce operating costs.”

Buffalo Automation, a startup with close ties to the University at Buffalo in New York, is developing autonomous boats and ships. Since 2015, it has equipped boats of varying sizes, from a small catamaran to large shipping vessels, with lidar, heat-sensitive cameras, and GPS. It started by making the equivalent of Tesla’s Autopilot, where a computer handles the steering, thruster controls, and propeller pitch, with a human supervising and ready to take control if something goes wrong. Since then the team has progressed to speed boats that don’t need that human backup, at least in certain, constrained conditions. Cameras around the boat remain vigilant for other water users, logs, kayakers, and swimmers.

The startup is now proving its system can handle ships as long as 800 feet in tricky situations. That includes testing its ability to get through a series of locks, and on Cleveland’s well-trafficked, narrow Cuyahoga River.

Some researchers at MIT are thinking smaller. They have designed a 3-D-printable, 13- by 6-foot boat they think could ferry people or goods around cities with rich waterways like Amsterdam or Bangkok. “Imagine shifting some of infrastructure services that usually take place during the day on the road—deliveries, garbage management, waste management—to the middle of the night, on the water, using a fleet of autonomous boats,” says MIT’s CSAIL lab director, Daniela Rus.

The team believes their boats could also use their onboard GPS sensors and inertial measurement units to precisely position themselves in packs, forming instant floating bridges, or stages, or platforms for pop-up food markets on the water. It’s working on the control software needed now, with tests of a smaller vessel on the Charles River in Massachusetts.

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The US Navy is also investigating the usefulness of swarming autonomous boats to patrol coastlines or surround a hostile vessel. It’s developing a system that would allow autonomous vessels to talk to each other and collectively decide on the best approach to block a boat’s path or nudge it clear of a restricted area.

Now, automating the way boats move doesn’t mean jobs on container ships will be going away any time soon. “The crew doesn’t focus solely on navigation. Most of what they do today is ship maintenance and things like emergency firefighting,” says Buffalo Automation’s Vikram. “From our perspective, this is a complementary technology.”

He believes the first commercial application could be autonomous tugboats, which currently need crews of up to five people, to help maneuver large ships into tight docks. That's the sort of task a computer, with appropriate sensors, could handle easily.

So while companies like Waymo, Tesla, General Motors, and dozens of others vie to put robo-rubber on the road, don’t be surprised if some developers set sail. They may not save huge numbers of lives, but dominion over two-thirds of the planet isn’t a bad consolation prize.

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‘It’s Coming’: Inside the Race to Make Self-Docking Boats a Reality

Boats that will pull themselves into a slip while you and your guests sip cocktails could be here by the end of the decade., michael verdon, michael verdon's most recent stories, new zealand’s thrilling win gets the america’s cup off to a rip-roaring start.

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Sixteen years after Volvo Penta introduced its first joystick boat control, the yachting world is planning its next step toward autonomous piloting with assisted-docking systems. But don’t let go of the wheel just yet: The ability to have your boat automatically pull into a slip while you and your guests sip cocktails on the foredeck could still be 5 or even 10 years away.

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Sailing Toward Autonomy: Future of Self-Driving Cargo Ships

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Yara Birkeland container ship will be the first fully autonomous, electric-propelled, zero-emission vessel. Photo: Mark Kane, Yara

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Sep 2, 2019

John Kosowatz

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This Self-Driving Boat Maps Underwater Terrain

Engineers concoct an easier way for scientists to study underwater topography.

EL PASO, Texas (June 27, 2023) ¬– Step aside self-driving cars, self-driving boats are here — and they can do more than take you on a cruise.

An autonomous boat made by researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso floats at Ascarate Lake, located in El Paso, Texas. Credit: The University of Texas at El Paso.

Researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso have constructed a fully autonomous boat that can carry out bathymetric surveys — surveys of the depth and terrain of bodies of water like oceans, rivers and lakes. The team hopes the robotic boat can help simplify the survey process, which usually takes a crew of individuals to complete, as well as assist with reconnaissance missions.

The boat and its capabilities are described in the May issue of the journal Sensors .

“There are lots of reasons scientists carry out bathymetric surveys,” said Laura Alvarez, Ph.D. , lead author of the study. “If you want to work in water-related studies, you need to know the shape and landscape of bodies of water. For example, you might want to map a reservoir to learn about water supply for electrical demand, or a river to learn about river evolution or flow patterns.”

Alvarez, an assistant professor in UTEP’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences, specializes in unmanned systems for earth science. She started developing the boat several years ago but needed help tweaking and perfecting the system.

That’s when she recruited electrical engineering master’s student Fernando Sotelo ‘22 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“The first time we tested the boat was at the swimming pool at UTEP — just to make sure it could float,” laughed Fernando Sotelo, study co-author and now UTEP alumnus.

Over the course of a year, Sotelo refined the aluminum watercraft, a 3-foot-by-3-foot circular craft that rests on a thick black inner tube, testing it in various environments like New Mexico’s Grindstone and Elephant Butte lakes.

His goals included extending the boat’s hours of operation and reliability; and making it fully autonomous and responsive to potential environmental issues like wind speed and temperature flux. Now, a failsafe can detect when batteries are low or wind gusts are too high and triggers a return-to-base function.

The rudderless watercraft operates with four thrusters, allowing it to travel up to 5 feet per second and easily rotate 360-degrees. A solar panel and lithium battery allow the boat to last up to four hours at sea — covering an area up to 472,400 square feet.

All the while a multibeam echosounder — a sonar system — emits sound waves from the bottom of the boat. Water depth can be calculated by the time it takes for the sound wave to water to hit the seafloor and return to the sonar system. The sound itself that returns to the device can help detect the type of material on the seafloor.

To show proof of concept, the team successfully created 2D and 3D maps of portions of Ascarate Lake in El Paso, Texas and Grindstone Lake in Ruidoso, New Mexico.

“My goal was to make the boat state-of-the-art and I think I did that. Of course, there’s always room to improve,” said Sotelo, who worked on the boat for his master’s thesis. “But the system works and for now, I hope it can make it easier for scientists like Dr. Alvarez to conduct their research.”

Alvarez will put the boat to use for the first time this summer to study the Rio Grande River’s flow and depth.

She adds that the instructions to replicate the boat are online in their latest Sensors publication.

“The reason we wrote the paper was so that anyone can reproduce it by themselves,” Alvarez said. “It serves as an effective guideline to get them started.”

This project received funding under award NA22SEC4810016 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Science Center Educational Partnership Program with Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) and through the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award 2239550. The statements, findings, conclusions and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA and NSF.

About The University of Texas at El Paso

The University of Texas at El Paso is America’s leading Hispanic-serving University. Located at the westernmost tip of Texas, where three states and two countries converge along the Rio Grande, 84% of our 24,000 students are Hispanic, and half are the first in their families to go to college. UTEP offers 169 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs at the only open-access, top-tier research university in America.

Last Updated on June 27, 2023 at 12:00 AM | Originally published June 27, 2023

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Autonomous Boats

Our goal is to become the Tesla of the ocean by building self-driving boats. Potential uses include autonomous cargo ships, autonomous yachts, autonomous ferries, and autonomous recreational boats.

We started by using a 3D printer to build a vehicle that was not made to float:

Next, we created our first model boat prototype and tested it in water:

The boat shown in the video above is not autonomous, it is controlled remotely by a phone. But this is the first step in making it self-driving, because that same phone can then be programmed to control it automatically using GPS signals, without the use of a human.

Keep in mind it took James Dyson 5,127 tries to invent his revolutionary vacuum cleaner, and Thomas Edison made over 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb before it finally worked. So we are just getting started.

The model boat in the video is made entirely using a 3D printer. Although it is not self-driving, being able to control it remotely is the first step to adding the autonomous part. The next version will carry a cell phone, which will control the boat and allow the user to remotely log in to enter a destination for the boat to go to.

The body of the boat is made of PLA white plastic and was printed on an Anet A8+ 3D printer in one single print. The model itself was designed with Python and OpenSCAD by my programmer (Peter Chervenski) in a Jupyter notebook. He initially modeled only the motor cases and the propellers to ensure a perfect fit and also to measure how much current the motor draws with the propeller on. With that info, he selected two LM317 regulators for each motor (adjusted to output 12V), one 7805 regulator for the NodeMCU, and two TIP31C MOSFET transistors used as relays.

He then built a crude model of the electronics on a breadboard and once it worked, soldered the components on a PCB board to make it permanent. The next step was programming the NodeMCU using a computer over the USB port. The program simply turns on/off two pins on the NodeMCU in response to the command it receives over Bluetooth.

For the remote control part, he wrote an Android app in Java which shows 3 buttons “left”, “right” and “both”. Touching a button turns on the motor, and lifting the finger from the button turns the motor off. Finally, he added an on/off switch for the whole thing, installed and glued the battery box to the body, then the PCB board, connected all wires and it was done.

One of the biggest problems with all of this is that weeks worth of work can be ruined by putting the boat in the water and having the electronics get wet. For the boat you see in our video, duct tape was used in an effort to reduce the probability water would get inside. But that did not work very well (plus a piece of the duct tape got caught in the propellers, making noise) so we need to find a better solution.

Our next version of the boat will actually drive itself, and hopefully not sink.

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Uber to Begin Offering Self-Driving Cruise Cars

Uber Technologies Inc. plans to start offering self-driving Cruise LLC cars to customers on its ride-hailing platform next year.

Once the multiyear partnership between Uber and Cruise begins, an Uber rider requesting a qualifying ride will have the option of choosing a Cruise autonomous vehicle, the companies said in a joint statement Thursday.

General Motors Co.’s Cruise has been trying to regain traction after grounding its fleet in October following the mishandling by prior management of a collision with a pedestrian. One of the San Francisco-based firm’s vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian, who was hospitalized for months. California regulators pulled Cruise’s driverless license alleging that the company was not forthcoming with details about the incident.

Related: GM’s Cruise Recalls Nearly 1,200 Robotaxis to Close U.S. Probe

Cruise is targeting a return to running fully autonomous rides later this year and possibly charging fares by early 2025, Bloomberg reported last month, citing people familiar with the matter.

Uber said the offering will begin early next year in a single market in the US to start, while declining to disclose the location.

Top Photo: A Cruise autonomous taxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday Aug. 10, 2023. California regulators are poised to decide whether two rival robotaxi services can provide around-the-clock rides throughout San Francisco, despite escalating fears about recurring incidents that have caused the driverless vehicles to block traffic or imperil public safety, reported the AP. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

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Mike Lynch, Bloomer Among Victims Found Dead on Sunken Yacht

(Bloomberg) -- British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer were among the victims found dead on a luxury yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday.

Lynch’s death was confirmed by people with direct knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified. Bloomer and his wife Judy were among the dead, their children said in a statement on Thursday.

They were among the five that have been recovered from inside the sunken ship. One person remains missing after the Bayesian was hit by a tornado near Porticello, Sicily, on Monday. Adding to the complexity of the search mission is the “narrowness of the spaces” inside the sunken yacht and “the presence of many objects,” the coast guard said.

Overall, of the 22 passengers in the boat, 15 were rescued on Monday. The body of Recaldo Thomas, the ship’s chef, was found soon after the Bayesian sank.

Lynch’s daughter Hannah, Clifford Chance partner Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda have not been officially accounted for.

Italian authorities are investigating exactly how the Bayesian sank — and why it sank so quickly — in a storm that struck in the early hours of Monday morning. The captain and other survivors have been questioned by the local prosecutor’s office, according to Italian media.

The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch said it’s also probing the incident, with questions centered on the expansiveness of the yacht’s mast and the state of the hull.

“Right now there is no evidence that the mast has been snapped,” coast guard spokesman Vincenzo Zagarola told Bloomberg News. “We can also say that, so far, there is no evidence that the hull has been broken. But we don’t have a clear idea yet of the full damage.”

The head of the company that built the Bayesian said the luxury yacht should have been “unsinkable” given sailboats are built in a way that allows for significant listing without capsizing.

“That ship is unsinkable because it is a sailboat,” Italian Sea Group Chief Executive Officer Giovanni Costantino said in an interview with Bloomberg News. His company bought Perini Navi, the Italian shipbuilder that made the Bayesian, in 2022.

Crews aided by military ships, remote controlled underwater vehicles and helicopters have been searching for missing passengers since Monday. Six guests, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, and nine crew have been rescued.

Lynch, 59, and his family were celebrating his recent acquittal from fraud charges with a small group of advisers when the violent storm struck. The charges stemmed from Lynch’s sale of his software firm Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. in 2011. The Silicon Valley giant went on to accuse Lynch of accounting failures. He’d spent years working to clear his name in court and restore his reputation as one of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs.

A little over two months before the yacht accident, a San Francisco jury found Lynch not guilty of criminal charges that he duped HP into overpaying for his company. He was still fighting HP in a civil case in London, where a British judge held him responsible for creating the illusion of a company much larger and more successful than it really was.

Rescue workers have had difficulties gaining access to the yacht some 50 meters below the surface, citing the depth and position of the vessel’s hull.

“The search will go on as long as necessary,” Zagarola told Bloomberg. “For sure the whole hull will need to be inspected meter by meter.”

--With assistance from Olivia Solon.

(Updates throughout.)

Uber will add driverless Cruise vehicles to its fleet in 2025

A Chevy Bolt is used as an autonomous vehicle.

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After losing its California operating license last year over safety concerns, the autonomous vehicle company Cruise will soon partner with Uber to offer driverless transportation through the popular ride-hail app.

Cruise and Uber announced a multiyear partnership that will begin in 2025 and allow Uber customers to select a driverless Cruise vehicle for qualified trips. The partnership will begin in a single, unspecified city and will rely on Chevy Bolt-based autonomous vehicles.

Cruise idled its entire fleet in October after California regulators revoked the company’s license to provide driverless rides, alleging that the company mishandled a safety incident in which a pedestrian was struck and dragged by a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco.

The pedestrian, who was in the street after being struck by a car with a driver, was pinned under a Cruise vehicle and sent to the hospital with injuries. In 2018, a self-driving vehicle from Uber hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, causing the company to halt its driverless program in several cities.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 20: Cruise Founder & CEO Kyle Vogt speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 20, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

A Cruise car hit a pedestrian. The company’s response could set back California’s new robotaxi industry

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Driverless Cruise vehicles remain banned in California, but autonomous cars operated by the Google spinoff Waymo are serving customers in San Francisco. Waymo is expanding into cities around the Bay Area and Southern California, the Associated Press reported, and announced that its robotaxis are completing more than 100,000 paid rides per week. Both Cruise and Uber are based in San Francisco.

Cruise, founded in 2013 and owned by General Motors, is providing trips with a driver behind the wheel in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas. The Uber partnership probably will be launched in one of those cities, the company said, and will rely on autonomous vehicles with no driver.

“Cruise is on a mission to leverage driverless technology to create safer streets and redefine urban life,” Cruise Chief Executive Marc Whitten said in a statement announcing the partnership. “We are excited to partner with Uber to bring the benefits of safe, reliable, autonomous driving to even more people.”

Whitten began leading the company after founder and CEO Kyle Vogt stepped down after the California license suspension. The partnership with Uber is the company’s latest move under Whitten to regain public trust and establish a reliable revenue stream.

GM has not made any money off Cruise, instead seeing $5.8 billion in losses on the robotaxi service from 2021 to 2023, according to the AP. The automaker had an operating loss of $900 million on Cruise in the first half of this year.

Despite financial woes and safety missteps, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said his company is excited about the partnership.

“We believe Uber can play an important role in helping to safely and reliably introduce autonomous technology to consumers and cities around the world,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement.

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Uber partners with GM's Cruise to offer self-driving ride service

General Motors' self-driving car subsidiary Cruise is partnering with ride-share company Uber Technologies Inc. in a multiyear deal, the companies announced Thursday.

The companies did not offer any financial details of the arrangement, but they said they plan to launch the partnership next year with a dedicated number of Chevrolet Bolt-based autonomous vehicles.

Once the service is launched, when an Uber rider requests a qualifying ride on the Uber app, they may be given the option of choosing a self-driving Cruise vehicle.

“Cruise is on a mission to leverage driverless technology to create safer streets and redefine urban life," Marc Whitten, CEO of Cruise, said in a statement. "We are excited to partner with Uber to bring the benefits of safe, reliable, autonomous driving to even more people, unlocking a new era of urban mobility."

Uber's CEO said the company is thrilled with the partnership.

“As the largest mobility and delivery platform, we believe Uber can play an important role in helping to safely and reliably introduce autonomous technology to consumers and cities around the world,” Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO, said in a statement.

Not a first for either

Uber once intended to develop its own self-driving cars and partnered with Volvo in 2016. That ended when a self-driving Uber vehicle hit and killed a woman in 2018 as she was walking her bicycle across a road in Tempe, Arizona. The Uber safety driver on board at the time, Rafaela Vasquez, was ultimately found legally liable for the incident, according to Wired .

Uber has partnered with Waymo, owned by Google, to offer driverless rides or food delivery to Uber users via robotaxis in Arizona.

This new partnership with Uber is not the first time GM has partnered with a ride-hailing company. In 2016, GM invested $500 million in Lyft with plans to eventually develop a fleet of self-driving cars that could be hailed using Lyft’s mobile app. But by 2018, GM had decided to instead launch its own vehicles and network through Cruise.

Cruise spokeswoman Tiffany Testo said Cruise remains focused on "relaunching our own driverless app and service. The launch of this partnership will follow that and will be separate from the rides offered on their platform."

GM's continued support of Cruise

Since this spring, Cruise, which was founded in 2013, has been inching closer to restarting its driverless robo taxi business after halting all services and recalling its vehicles late last year. As of June, Cruise resumed manual driving in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas. Supervised driving is underway in Phoenix and Dallas, according to a company blog post .

During its second-quarter earnings in July , GM CEO Mary Barra said GM is suspending production of the Cruise Origin, a self-driving buslike vehicle that does not have steering wheel or pedals. It had been assembled at Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck for use in a Cruise robo-taxi fleet.

Barra said Cruise will focus "their next autonomous vehicle on the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt, instead of the Origin. This addresses the regulatory uncertainty we faced with the Origin because of its unique design. In addition, per-unit costs will be much lower, which will help Cruise optimize its resources."

More: GM's Cruise recalls nearly 1,200 robotaxis to close US investigation

Cruise had stopped all operations last fall after an incident in October in San Francisco, where the company is headquartered. A human-driven vehicle hit a pedestrian, pushing her into an oncoming Cruise self-driving car, which then dragged her several feet, leaving the woman critically injured. Cruise had been using modified Chevrolet Bolts at the time.

The fallout from that Oct. 2 accident resulted in regulators suspending Cruise from further operations in San Francisco. That was followed by Cruise opting to suspend all its operations nationwide. Cruise was accused of misleading federal regulators about the incident too. Ultimately, Cruise fired nine executives and cut about 24% of its full-time employees , about 900 people. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt and co-founder and Chief Product Officer Dan Kan resigned.

As the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, has reported, GM has invested about $8 billion in Cruise since 2016. Cruise leaders had at one point promised to deliver $1 billion in annual revenue by 2025, but the subsidiary has not made any money. In April, Barra reiterated to Wall Street that relaunching Cruise safely, "while delivering strong margins and cash flows," is a top priority for GM this year.

GM has never wavered in its support of the company's mission, and earlier this year GM CFO Paul Jacobson said the company expects to spend $1.7 billion on Cruise operations this year, down slightly from GM’s spend on Cruise in previous years of around $2 billion a year.

Contact Jamie L. LaReau: [email protected] . Follow her on Twitter @ jlareauan .

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These Self-Driving EV Taxis Could Soon Be Hitting the Roads in Japan

The next time you go to Japan, you could very well find yourself taking a self-driving taxi.

The Japanese start-up Tier IV is hoping to soon put autonomous EV cabs on the road in Tokyo, Wired reported last Thursday. The country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry has chosen the company for a demonstration project, and Tier IV has already begun development.

Date Everything! will let you romance objects in your home on October 24

Wild-looking dating sim Date Everything! is coming to Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on October 24.

The 20 best Labor Day travel deals on luggage and accessories — starting at $8

From a four-piece luggage set at nearly $400 off to a 100% leather wallet for just $9, these travel deals are first-class finds at coach prices.

Balatro is crossing over with Witcher 3 and a bunch of other games

Poker roguelike Balatro is crossing over with a whole bunch of other games. The Witcher 3, Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver and Among Us have joined the party.

Liam and Noel Gallagher are finally reuniting. Why people still care about Oasis.

“The guns have fallen silent,” Oasis said in a statement announcing the tour. “The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”

Stock market today: US stocks tread water with Nvidia, rate cuts in focus

Stocks are struggling to find a footing as Nvidia's high-stakes earnings loom.

Paramount stock falls 5% as buyout saga appears to finally reach conclusion

Paramount Global's messy merger drama finally appears to have reached its conclusion.

Jason and Travis Kelce's podcast deal with Amazon reportedly worth more than $100 million

The Kelce brothers are a hit in the podcasting world, too.

Georgia Tech upsets Florida State, CFP Predictions & what are we watching in Week 1? | College Football Power Hour

Caroline Fenton, Jason Fitz and the newest addition to Yahoo Sports, Adam Breneman kick off the inaugural College Football Power Hour with a look at Week 0's biggest matchup, a surprising result in which the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets surprised two continents with a win over ranked Florida State in Dublin, Ireland. The crew explains how Haynes King and Brent Key led the team to a victory and why the 0-1 hole Mike Norvell's Seminoles squad finds itself in may not be the end of the world.

Jay Powell and future Fed chairs should be rooting for an EV future: Morning Brief

Americans base their outlook for inflation on gas more than anything else. An EV-powered future might make this less of a problem for the Fed.

nOps lands $30M to optimize AWS customers' cloud spend

Like countless other vendors, nOps sells software designed to "optimize" the budgets that businesses allocate to cloud products and services. JT Giri, the founder and CEO of nOps, got his start in the cloud industry as a network engineer and DevOps consultant. In 2012, he decided to take those skills and co-found a consulting company, nClouds, focused on AWS solutions.

The best online games and puzzles you can play daily in 2024

These are the best daily online games like Wordle you can play right now, as chosen by Engadget editors.

Congress begins investigating Trump’s assassination attempt, judge blocks Biden immigration policy, Oasis announces reunion tour

Get caught up on this morning’s news: Congress probes Trump’s assassination attempt, Oasis reuniting and more in today’s edition of The Yodel newsletter

Google's AI overviews in Hindi need a quality upgrade

Given India's language diversity, digital content companies already face a challenge in trying to show and translate content accurately. Google is facing a similar problem with AI overviews recently rolled out in the country. The company introduced Hindi support for AI overviews in the country earlier in August.

How the Lamborghini Temerario is more than a 907-hp hybrid that revs to 10 grand

Lamborghini product manager Paolo Racchetti explains how Lamborghini Temerario builds off the Huracan.

Wait, what? Pavel Durov says he has fathered more than 100 children

Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging platform Telegram, has been in the headlines since his arrest at a private airport near Paris on Saturday, reportedly in connection with an investigation into criminal activity on the app. While many stories since have centered on free speech (i.e, should what happens on Telegram stay on Telegram?), others have focused on Durov and his anti-establishment streak. One story stands out in particular -- Durov's claim on Telegram in late July that he has fathered over 100 biological children after donating sperm at a clinic 15 years ago to help a friend have a baby.

Seattle, Storm honor former star Sue Bird with street name outside of arena

Fans will now use “Sue Bird Court” to get to games at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

Aaron Judge does it all, this time with a home-run robbing double-play gem

Judge can do it with his glove too.

Uber gets slapped with €290 million fine

The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber.

How to lose belly fat and maintain a healthy lifestyle

Here are some expert tips for shedding inches off your waistline, including reducing carbs and exercising.

SELF DRIVING BOAT

In Dubai, there is something for everyone. While some come for the shopping, others come in search of adventure. You can have more fun with a self-driving boat rental in Dubai after you have experienced the local way of life and socialized with the people.

It will provide you the opportunity to see the city from an entirely new angle. You will only grow to love Dubai even more as a result. The greatest self-driving boat rental service is offered by Takeoffyachts.

Self Driving Boat in Dubai

One of the world’s most stunning coastlines may be found in Dubai. A self-driving boat is the ideal means of exploring the glistening clear waters. When riding a self-driving boat, you can’t go wrong. Take a trip that will show you the city from a new angle. You can only see everything Dubai has to offer when you take a Self-Driving Boat ride through the city.

The ability to explore the Dubai coastline at any time of day is its greatest feature. The water is perfect for riding a self-driving boat, and the weather is always pleasant. You can truly appreciate the beauty of the coastline when you rent a self-driving boat from us in Dubai.

Go On A Fun Adventure

There is no better rush of pure adrenaline than riding a self-driving boat. Your desire for adventure will be satiated when you rent a self-driving boat. This is an excellent way to begin or end your trip to Dubai. Feeling the fresh air on your face will revitalize you. We guarantee that your experience on a self-driving boat will be unforgettable. There’s really no better way to make your day better.

The feeling of plunging into the water at full speed is unmatched. You’ll feel fantastic and lose track of your worries. It’s an incredible feeling to be driving on the water and not have to worry about anyone getting in your way.

OUR PRICE LIST

Self-driving boat.

You are the captain now.

1 HOUR AED 600 Self-Driving Boat
2 HOURS AED 1200 Self-Driving Boat

Experience the epitome of luxury with our Dubai yacht rental. Sail the azure waters in style aboard our meticulously crafted yacht, equipped with opulent amenities and a professional crew to cater to your every need. Whether it’s a serene cruise along the iconic skyline or a lavish celebration on the Arabian Sea, our yacht ensures an unforgettable voyage in the heart of Dubai’s glamour.

4870 Dubai Marina Dubai, United Arab Emirates

+971 58 543 7438 [email protected]

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Location maps of Pskov Oblast
CC-BY-SA-2.0

Complete with a helicopter and two self driving Audi EV's
DON'T STOP-Small self-driving luxury yacht Private luxury fiberglass
This Luxury Hybrid Yacht Can Be Sailed by One Person, Is Totally Self
Self-driving catamarans are definitely the future!
Tesla Unveils Self-Sustaining Electric Yacht
SolarImpact Unveil 'Noiseless' Self-Sufficient Electric Yacht

COMMENTS

Autonomous boats are hitting the high seas
Self-driving boats are now crossing oceans. Slowly, self-steering ships are becoming a reality. In Norway, an autonomous battery-powered container vessel is shuttling fertilizer between a factory ...
The World's First Self-Docking Boat
The self-docking yacht incorporates both of these systems into an onboard electronic vessel control system, which maneuvers the steering according to the boat's actual position. Advertisement ... The self-driving prototype was developed in just a matter of months. "This was an expected next step from Volvo Penta," says Johan Inden, chief ...
Autonomous boats could be your next ride
Self-driving boats have been able to transport small items for years, but adding human passengers has felt somewhat intangible due to the current size of the vessels. Roboat II is the "half-scale" boat in the growing body of work, and joins the previously developed quarter-scale Roboat, which is 1 meter long. The third installment, which is ...
We're still waiting for self-driving cars, but autonomous boats are
Fully self-driving cars have been promised for years, but despite numerous road trials and advances in technology, we're still waiting. In 2016, Lyft predicted that most of its rides would be ...
Forget Self-Driving Cars: This 190-Foot Autonomous Superyacht Concept
Forget Self-Driving Cars: This 190-Foot Autonomous Superyacht Concept Can Self-Sail the High Seas ... A Fleet of Candela's Electric Foiling Yachts Is Rolling Out to the Red Sea in 2025.
Autonomous yachts could be the future thanks to AI
The most familiar autonomous developments are the self-driving cars currently being tested. Elements of this technology, such as automatic breaking, self-parking, front crash avoidance and lane drift warnings are already in use, and Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and Cadillac have more complex driver assist systems for limited applications.
Autonomous boats: The rise of self-sailing vessels
Sam Fortescue reports on the latest developments in autonomous boats and self-sailing technology, which is ready to be deployed in a variety of uses from weather monitoring to shipping. 'Vessel ...
ZEN50 Solar & Wingsail Electric Catamaran
The blue water capable ZEN50 lightweight racing carbon hulls are combined with a huge solar roof for an unrivaled solar power vs. displacement ratio above 1:1 (18 kW / 17 tonnes), making this yacht completely energy self-sufficient. A revolutionary, fully automated, wingsail - by Ayro© - can be added as a range and speed extender.
Forget Robo-Cars and Hit the Water on an Autonomous Boat
Topics Self-Driving Cars ships. Read More. New Jersey's $500 Million Bid to Become an AI Epicenter. The Garden State has enacted a hefty new tax credit specifically for AI businesses. But tax ...
Self-driving electric container ship sets sail in Norway
What's expected to be the first autonomous container ship is at the beginning of a two-year pilot.Norwegian fertiliser giant Yara is behind the vessel, which...
'It's Coming': Inside the Race to Make Self-Docking Boats a Reality
A self-docking Volvo-powered Azimut yacht. Courtesy of Volva Penta "This is just like how automatic transmissions replaced the manual clutch on cars," says Federico Ferrante, president of ...
Sailing Toward Autonomy: Future of Self-Driving Cargo Ships
Sailing Toward Autonomy: Future of Self-Driving Cargo Ships. Yara Birkeland container ship will be the first fully autonomous, electric-propelled, zero-emission vessel. Photo: Mark Kane, Yara. The port of Rotterdam is Europe's busiest, with almost 30,000 seagoing vessels and 107,000 inland vessels plying its waters annually.
The Dawn of Driverless Boats
A classic crossing situation where a Sea Machines' SAFE Boat is the burdened vessel. Her autonomous technology will "understand" the situation, turn to starboard in a timely manner, going under the stern of the other, privileged vessel, and then soon return to her original course. Self-Docking Technology.
The Future of Self-Driving Boats
Will boating follow the shipping industry down the road of autonomous driving? For better or worse, it just might. Skip to main content. Digital Boat Show. Yachts (80FT+) ... HMY Yacht Sales. Monte Carlo Yachts. Sunseeker. Volvo Penta. Site Map; Subscribe Print; Digital Magazine ... The Future of Self-Driving Boats. Author: Jeff Moser. Updated ...
This Self-Driving Boat Maps Underwater Terrain
The rudderless watercraft operates with four thrusters, allowing it to travel up to 5 feet per second and easily rotate 360-degrees. A solar panel and lithium battery allow the boat to last up to four hours at sea — covering an area up to 472,400 square feet. All the while a multibeam echosounder — a sonar system — emits sound waves from ...
Are Self-Driving Boats the Future?
Self-driving boats are here, but does the recreational market need it—or even want it? It's happening with cars, and now Sea Machines in Boston is developing the technology for autonomous, self-driving boats that can do the real dirty work on the water. Sea Machines' sea trials in the summer of 2017 showed that these pilot-free boats will one day snuff out oil fires, track criminals ...
Autonomous Boats
Our goal is to become the Tesla of the ocean by building self-driving boats. Potential uses include autonomous cargo ships, autonomous yachts, autonomous ferries, and autonomous recreational boats. We started by using a 3D printer to build a vehicle that was not made to float: Next, we created our first model boat prototype and tested it in water:
Uber to start offering self-driving cars
Uber and Cruise LLC, a self-driving car startup owned by General Motors, have announced a partnership in which Cruise will provide Chevy Bolt self-driving vehicles to the ridesharing giant beginnin…
Uber to Begin Offering Self-Driving Cruise Cars
Uber Technologies Inc. plans to start offering self-driving Cruise LLC cars to customers on its ride-hailing platform next year. Once the multiyear partnership between Uber and Cruise begins, an ...
Self-driving boats are already making a splash
Self-driving boats are already making a splash. Link Copied! In the UK, SEA-KIT International has developed the USV Maxlimer -- a semi-autonomous, remotely controlled uncrewed surface vessel (USV ...
Mike Lynch, Bloomer Among Victims Found Dead on Sunken Yacht
British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer were among the victims found dead on a luxury yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday.
Uber will add driverless Cruise vehicles to its fleet in 2025
In 2018, a self-driving vehicle from Uber hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, causing the company to halt its driverless program in several cities. Business A Cruise car hit a pedestrian.
Uber partners with GM's Cruise to offer self-driving ride hailing
In 2016, GM invested $500 million in Lyft with plans to eventually develop a fleet of self-driving cars that could be hailed using Lyft's mobile app. But by 2018, GM had decided to instead ...
Uber partners with GM's Cruise to offer self-driving car rides
The deal mirrors Uber's partnership with self-driving group Waymo in the city of Phoenix, and is part of its push to become the go-to platform for consumers looking to ride in autonomous vehicles.
These Self-Driving EV Taxis Could Soon Be Hitting the Roads in ...
The software that Tier IV has created to help its self-driving cars run, called Autoware, is available as an open-source resource for other companies, too. ... The ABCs of Chartering a Yacht. Sign ...
THE 10 BEST Restaurants with Outdoor Seating in Pskov
Best Restaurants with Outdoor Seating in Pskov, Pskov Oblast: Find Tripadvisor traveler reviews of THE BEST Pskov Restaurants with Outdoor Seating and search by price, location, and more.
Self Driving Boat
A self-driving boat is the ideal means of exploring the glistening clear waters. When riding a self-driving boat, you can't go wrong. Take a trip that will show you the city from a new angle. You can only see everything Dubai has to offer when you take a Self-Driving Boat ride through the city.
Karevo Map
Karevo is a rural locality in Kunyinsky District, Pskov Oblast, Russia. Mapcarta, the open map.
Pskov
Pskov (Russian: Псков, IPA: ⓘ; see also names in other languages) is a city in northwestern Russia and the administrative center of Pskov Oblast, located about 20 kilometers (12 mi) east of the Estonian border, on the Velikaya River.Population: 193,082 (2021 Census); [7] 203,279 (2010 Russian census); [2] 202,780 (2002 Census); [8] 203,789 (1989 Soviet census).
File:Relief Map of Pskov Oblast.jpg
Add a one-line explanation of what this file represents. Summary [edit]. Description