Tomorrow is Today

“Before satellite AIS came along, you’d talk to people and they’d just assume that ships were tracked wherever they went in the world. But the reality was that there were 60,000 ships out there carrying nine trillion dollars’ worth of cargo, and when the captain went over the horizon, unless he sent a signal, no-one knew where he went. That’s all changed now.”

(via BBC News - Ahoy! Your ship is being tracked from orbit)

Trans-Polar Shipping Up 75% as Arctic Ice Continues Its Retreat

The melting of northern ice continues to open long-pursued arctic sea routes to practical navigation, according to a new Arctic Institute Center for Circumpolar Security Studies (CCSS) report.

By the middle of November 2012, when ice closes the Northern Sea Route (along Eurasia’s north shore from the Bering Strait to Murmansk), shipping volume will have soared more than 75% above 2011 tonnage—to about 1.5 million tons, up from 850,000 tons.

Since the Arctic Ocean ice cap seems to be retreating towards Greenland and Canada’s Nunavut Territory, the Northern Sea Route is the first of the three principal arctic sea lanes to become navigable.

…CCSS analysts Malte Humpert and Andreas Raspotnik note that some northern connections between European and Asian ports can be as much as 40 percent shorter than courses carrying ships through the Suez Canal. This saves fuel and salaries on each trip, of course. It also allows ship-owners to make more trips per year or, alternatively, make super-slow trips—attractive because dropping a ship’s speed by 40% can double its fuel efficiency, cutting both costs and emissions.

…As the authors point out, “Global shipping operations depend on three key factors: predictability, punctuality, and economy-of-scale,” all still problematic along Arctic routes. But the ice cap’s steady retreat suggests that these important supports will evolve.

(via Arctic-Ocean Shipping Doubles as Melting Ice Opens Sea Lanes - IEEE Spectrum)

Navy to Test New Design For Surveillance Buoys To Protect Coastal Waterways

About 40 percent of U.S. trade—some $1.4 trillion a year—passes through the country’s 360 ports and waterways.

[D]espite increased protection since 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says that these ports remain especially vulnerable to attack from small vessels carrying improvised explosive devices, including radioactive dirty bombs.

The problem is that today’s radar and video-based systems have trouble accurately tracking small boats. Intellicheck Mobilisa, a wireless-technology firm in Port Townsend, Washington, is trying to address this vulnerability with the first buoy system that can communicate in real time to the shore.

The system uses radiation detectors and video cameras to find and track potentially dangerous vessels. Each buoy also carries sensors that detect weather and water conditions for environmental research. And they do it all using primarily off-the-shelf technologies, which keep the cost at $100,000 each. That’s cheap, considering that just nine buoys could protect all of Washington State’s Puget Sound and the more than $80 billion worth of goods that travel through it each year.

This month, the Navy will run the first full-scale demonstration of the system, tracking a vessel through 11 miles of the corridor that leads to Seattle.

(via A Buoy-Based Security System For Our Ports | Popular Science)

DARPA’s “Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform” Transforms Container Ships into Humanitarian Aid Stations

Under DARPA’s TEMP program (that’s Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform), Raytheon has addressed these problems by creating an all-in-one solution for turning the closest available container ships into floating humanitarian mission centers employing everything from unmanned cranes to UAVs to quickly transport aid to where it’s most needed without docking at a seaport or relying on terrestrial transportation.

First, it designed a mission management module that can store easily inside a shipping container for use on board the ship. From here, aid workers can coordinate their missions and control various other TEMP technologies—technologies like the ParaFoil Air Delivery System, an unmanned powered paraglider that can ferry 3,000-pound pallets from the deck of the ship across the water to sites onshore.

With multiple ParaFoils deployed as an “air bridge,” Raytheon says it can move 125,000 pounds per day inland, as the individual UAVs can travel up to 75 miles without refueling.

To ensure that the chain of cargo flowing from an offshore container ship to the people who need it ashore remains unbroken, Raytheon has also designed a modular, motion-stabilized crane that breaks down to fit inside a standard shipping container and can be quickly deployed on the ship to move fully loaded shipping containers around on deck.

These cranes can be used to move containers onboard the ship or to lift them overboard and place them on smaller boats that can ferry them ashore.

The idea here is that humanitarian workers or aid groups could quickly (it takes less than a day to outfit a container ship) convert readily available commercial vessels into floating aid stations that can simply pull up to a coastline and start offloading supplies, bypassing the logistical nightmares often inherent in disaster situations. That should save time and lives—and help to keep the Navy on task.

(via Modular System Quickly Converts Container Ships to Drone-Powered Humanitarian Aid Stations | Popular Science)

Sail Power Makes a Comeback on Green Cargo Ships

Ireland-based B9 Shipping has started work on a full-scale demonstration vessel as part of its goal to design the modern world’s first 100 percent fossil fuel-free cargo sailing ships.

Unlike most conventional large cargo vessels, which are powered by bunker fuel, B9 Shipping’s cargo ship would employ a Dyna-rig sail propulsion system combined with an off-the-shelf Rolls-Royce engine powered by liquid biomethane derived from municipal waste.

The company says all of the technologies that will be used in its cargo vessels are already proven and readily available. The Dyna-rig sail system was originally conceived in the 1960s by German hydraulics engineer Wilhelm Prolls and was first used by Italian shipbuilders Perini Navi in its 289 ft (88 m) clipper, The Maltese Falcon, which made its maiden voyage in 2006. The free standing and free rotating system has no rigging and comprises multiple relatively small sails that are operated electronically from the bridge. This allows them to be trimmed quickly to maximize wind power and turned out of the wind in the event of sudden squalls.

(via B9 Shipping developing 100 percent fossil fuel-free cargo sailing ships ht futurist-foresight, ht wildcat2030)

Developing New Approaches to Capture the Potential of Dirigibles

Revolutionizing transportation with airships is an old idea but a persistent one, and it’s usually the military that brings it closer to reality.

More than a century after George Griffith described armed conflict fought with “war balloons” in his popular novel The Angel of the Revolution, the U.S. military was considering the merits of transporting materiel with airships.

In 2005 Darpa, the Pentagon’s experimental branch, initiated Project Walrus and set about finding a contractor to build a “hybrid ultra-large aircraft” that could transport 500 tons of cargo at least 12,000 nautical miles. Pasternak’s Aeros got the biggest contract of the project. (“There is only one solution,” Pasternak had explained to the Los Angeles Times, “and we have that one solution.”)

But in 2010, the Pentagon chose not to renew Project Walrus, a fate not uncommon to airship schemes.

(via A Plan For Airships That Might Finally Take Off | Popular Science)

Autonomous Cargo Drones Learn to Manage Swinging Loads

Last year, the optionally-manned KMAX made its first autonomous cargo delivery in Afghanistan, and since it can fly as many missions as you have fuel to keep it going, it’s definitely a safer and more efficient way to get supplies to troops, especially in dangerous areas.

To move cargo around, helicopters (autonomous or otherwise) often carry stuff slung beneath them on long ropes, and as you can probably imagine, said cargo often ends up doing all sorts of swinging about, especially if the helicopter that’s carrying it has to maneuver. Researchers from the University of New Mexico have been developing algorithms that allow robots to compensate for motion-induced swinging of suspended loads, and testing them out on real live quadrotors.

Essentially, what the quadrotor is doing here is dynamically adjusting its trajectory to damp out the swinging motion of its cargo…

It’s sort of like an upside-down version of pendulum balancing, with maybe a little bit of this insane hinged stick balancing thrown in for good measure. Next, the researchers plan to see if they can get their algorithms to work on platforms that are less balanced (and more realistic), which (they say) should be “an important step towards developing the next generation of autonomous aerial vehicles.”

(via Quadrotor Learns How Not To Swing Stuff - IEEE Spectrum)

Self-Driving Tractors and Cargo Planes Coming Soon:

Someday soon, FedEx packages could be transported by autonomous planes and apple trees sprayed by driverless tractors, says aerospace and robotics expert Mary “Missy” Cummings.

Cummings, a professor of aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was interviewed today at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference in New York, where she offered her views on the state of the art in autonomous vehicles.

The work of Google and automakers has shown how cars can drive themselves in some situations. And many commercial flights are already fly-by-wire, allowing pilots to monitor the plane for when something wrong happens, rather than actively take off, fly, and land.

Now the technology is advancing to the point where more autonomy is available — if people become comfortable with it.

(via Robotic planes, tractors loom behind autonomous cars | Cutting Edge - CNET News)