Ships of the future will soon be steered across the Seven
Seas – unmanned. A new simulator is helping propel these plans forward.
Partners from five different countries engineered the design of the autonomous
freighter.
Hans-Christoph Burmeister scans over the onboard
instrumentation: an electronic maritime chart; a display of water depths; the
adjacent monitor that displays the radar image. Burmeister then reaches for the
wheel and steers his 220 m mass-goods freighter into a new direction. “We are
now sailing on a course of 290 degrees, speed twelve knots.” Even if this
scenario is quite realistic, Burmeister is no captain on the bridge, but is
standing instead in a room at the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and
Services CML in Hamburg. A ship navigation simulator has been installed at the
facility of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML.