Autonomous ships

Shifting the chief engineer role from ship to shore

Shifting the chief engineer role from ship to shore

As reported in Ship & Boat International May/June 2024 (pages 16-19), Kongsberg Maritime’s development of remote operation centres (ROCs) for uncrewed (or minimally crewed) vessels has seen the company work to bring traditional crewing roles onto shore – “starting with the chief engineer, then the navigator, then the master”, Ville Vihervaara, Kongsberg VP for Remote […]

Autonomous zero-emission boxship enters design phase

Autonomous zero-emission boxship enters design phase

Zulu Associates, the Belgian short-sea shipping company, has contracted Conoship International to advance the design of the Zulu MASS 200TEU container vessel. The new 100m-long vessel will be powered by zero-emission propulsion technology and provide a short-sea platform initially for direct container and feeder flows. It will be able to operate on both rivers and […]

SeaBot Maritime

SeaBot Maritime

Green light for SeaBot course Training provider SeaBot Maritime has received UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) voluntary recognition for its maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) Remote Operator training course. Developed jointly by SeaBot and Fugro Middle East, the course is intended as the first module in SeaBot’s wider MASS Certified Professional training scheme (MCP) […]

Special delivery

Special delivery

As Norway’s largest grocery wholesaler, with 600+ trucks on the road daily, ASKO is used to juggling budgets to keep overheads to a minimum. So, when it came to shifting some of its road traffic volume onto the Oslo Fjord, the company’s new ASKO Maritime division decided uncrewed operations would be the most cost-efficient path […]

HII deploys unmanned underwater vehicle from amphibious vessel

HII deploys unmanned underwater vehicle from amphibious vessel

June 2022 saw Huntington Ingalls Industries (HHI) successfully demonstrate the ability of an amphibious warship to launch, operate with and recover a large-diameter unmanned underwater vehicles (LDUUV). The research and development initiative between HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding and mission technologies divisions is one of a portfolio of internal research and development efforts aimed at advance new […]

Atlantic independence

Atlantic independence

On 14 March this year, the Caribbean island of Martinique received an unusual visitor. Arriving on the beach in Le Lorrain was an uncrewed surface vessel (USV), which had made its own way across the Atlantic from Spain, fuelled purely by solar power – a journey spanning some 4,300nm. What’s more impressive is that the 4m USV, […]

75 years of Ship & Boat International

75 years of Ship & Boat International

  It’s unlikely that many readers of the first issue of Ship & Boat International, published in 1947, could have envisaged a world of solar-powered ferries, unmanned tugs and offshore wind farms capable of powering tens of thousands of homes. Similarly, the abilities to conduct virtual reality walkthroughs of vessel plans, prior to construction, and to pay […]