CARGO and load handling firm MacGregor is designing 'smart' systems that will complement autonomous vessels, such as its new autonomous bulk handling cranes that the company showcased at the SMM 2018 conference in Hamburg, Germany
CARGO and load handling firm MacGregor is designing 'smart' systems that will complement autonomous vessels, such as its new autonomous bulk handling cranes that the company showcased at the SMM 2018 conference in Hamburg, Germany. The company has been developing and testing the world's first self-learning autonomous discharging cranes together with ESL Shipping Oy.
MacGregor and its sister companies, Kalmar and Cargotec, are focused on reducing inefficiencies and waste, like idle time spent waiting in port which has the potential to reduce a shipment's overall greenhouse gas footprint and help meet the UN's International Maritime Organisation's goal to reduce greenhouse gases by 50 per cent from 2008 to 2050.
'Autonomous vessels can be a part of reducing that waste too and we are very engaged in this effort,' MacGregor president Michel van Roozendaal told Fort Lauderdale's Maritime Executive at the conference.
'If you have an autonomous vessel, but you still need a crewmember to operate the crane, you still have to make space on board for that individual. To be fully autonomous these ships will also have to have autonomous subsystems,' he said.
'Autonomous vessels will be a journey. It's not like one day you will suddenly have a crewless ship sailing from Asia to Europe. It will start gradually, perhaps with small ferries on defined routes and it will be tested at a modest scale.'
To help the IMO's CO2 targets, autonomous vessels could practice slow steaming. 'At very low speed, less than 10 knots, then you can start to look at alternative energy sources. This might not work for consumer goods but for bulk cargoes that are not time sensitive it might be viable.'
He continued: 'In the very long term one way to get to a low carbon footprint would be to return to sail power to move bulk cargoes at low speed.
'What's most important is a level playing field. If we decide, as mankind, that we want to ship goods from A to B and we want to do so in a sustainable way then if everybody plays by these same rules and everything gets a bit more expensive, we should be prepared to pay for that.'
