The Future of Smart Autonomy is here

Discovering a stepwise approach to autonomous shipping to improve safety and efficiency

How to leverage on the key enablers for moving towards autonomous operations in the future boosting synergies and improving operational processes?

Key takeaways

• How can Smart Autonomy help address today’s shipping challenges?
• What are the enablers for Smart Autonomy?
• What are the merits of a stepwise approach?
• How to get started?

Instead of contributing to the debate around what the future of shipping will look like and what role unmanned vessels will play, this paper argues that the journey itself may turn out to be more important than the destination. The pursuit of autonomous vessels is already leading to smarter systems that can enhance the safety, cost-efficiency and environmental performance of today’s vessels; in practice, this means things like reducing collisions or incidents—especially in busy ports—assisting with docking, saving fuel through optimised speed profiles and reducing associated emissions.

At Wärtsilä we call this “Smart Autonomy,” and it means a commercially viable approach that can be applied today at the beginning of our journey towards an autonomous shipping future.

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Written by

Iain Huntly-Playle

GM, Engineering

Hendrik Bußhoff

Head of Product Autonomy Solutions

Hussain Quraishi

Manager, Strategic Innovation