British shipyard Automated Ships Ltd will start building the first fully autonomous unmanned boat designed for offshore operations early this year.
The vessel, called Hrönn, has been developed in cooperation with Kongsberg Maritime of Norway. The testing of the boat will take place in Norway at a specially built experimental stand in Trondheims Fjord.
The Hrönn platform supply vessel is expected to enter service in 2018. It will be equipped with dynamic positioning system K-Pos, electronic mapping navigation and information system K-Bridge and automation system K-Chief. The data from these systems will be sent to a coastal control center, allowing the boat to be controlled remotely.
There is growing interest in drone boats in the industry: first Roll-Royce said it had set up a consortium to develop technology for autonomous, remotely piloted vessels, then the UK Navy conducted tests of a drone boat called MAST on the Thames. Although the MAST has technology that allows it to see other vessels and avoid them, on a river as crowded as the Thames, it was launched with a human on board.
