Driverless Boats?
On Monday, the Pentagon, revealed the "Sea Hunter". It is a self-driving, 132-foot ship that can travel up to 10,000 nautical miles (used for charting and navigation and about 0.5 more than a regular "mile"). This ship will be used for hunting for submarines and underwater mines, hence the name. The Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will work with the Navy to test the ship off of the San Diego coastline during the next two years to see how it works on its own and how it avoids other ships.
The "Sea Hunter" works off of sonar, radar, cameras, and a global positioning system. Military leader and commercial shipping industries will be tracking how the progress on this ship goes. The companies that ship from Europe to Asia have been looking for a way to get fleets of unmanned ship to cut down on coast and go through areas with pirates, although there are no plans to arm the ship with weapons.
The ship will have no human operators on it, but some people see this as a bad thing. They see it this way because they don't think that a ship can respond to the dangers at sea or foresee them. People also wonder if the ship will be able to be hacked into. Military officials have been working on a way to cyber-secure the ship so that it is not able to be hacked. Right now, the ship costs $120 million to develop but DARPA officials say that they can bring the production cost down to $20 million.
