British mega-corp Rolls-Royce Holdings plc has announced that it plans on launching a fleet of remote controlled cargo ships by 2020, and the company says that fully automated ships could follow soon after.

Rolls-Royce calls the new program the Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative (AAWA), and it recently presented a whitepaper outlining the tech behind the ships at the Autonomous Ship Technology Symposium 2016 in Amsterdam.

“This is happening. It’s not if, it’s when,” said Oskar Levander, Rolls-Royce, Vice President of Innovation – Marine. “The technologies needed to make remote and autonomous ships a reality exist. The AAWA project is testing sensor arrays in a range of operating and climatic conditions in Finland and has created a simulated autonomous ship control system which allows the behaviour of the complete communication system to be explored. We will see a remote controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade.”

Modern cargo ships are already manned by extremely small crews, and in many ways the jump to automation is easier for large ships than it would be for cars. Aside from leaving and entering port, much of the ships’ time is spent at sea where there are few obstacles and little risk of colliding into objects (icebergs notwithstanding).

Several of the concept images released by Rolls-Royce show augmented reality displays for the ships, which relay important information about the ship and its surroundings, including direction, speed, distances to nearby objects, and more.

Full automation may not be arriving in the immediate future, but Rolls-Royce’s remote control project will already offer many of the same benefits, as there would be no need to support crews onboard for weeks at a time. It would also be possible for one person to pilot multiple ships at once, further reducing the number of actual crew needed to operate a fleet.

Image courtesy of Rolls-Royce Holdings plc