What's Better Than a Robot Warship? A 'Talking' Robot Warship

[Boats]

What's Better Than a Robot Warship? A 'Talking' Robot Warship
By: Kyle Mizokami - Popular Mechanics - 1-1-20
Re: https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...ng-robot-ship/

Photo link: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod...g?resize=768:*

* The U.S. Navy is preparing to enter the world of robotic warships.

* For safety’s sake, robot ships need to be able to converse with human sailors on other ships.

* The technology will require not only understanding human speech but also interacting with humans.

The U.S. Navy is embarking on an effort to turn at least some ships of the battle fleet into unmanned, robot warriors. One problem with unmanned ships: they must still interact with civilian ships, particularly in congested waterways. The Navy’s goal is ships that not only understand queries from human sailors on nearby ships but can also talk with those humans how their two ships, one manned the other unmanned, will pass one another safely.

The U.S. Navy realizes that unmanned ships must still be able to abide by the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS). COLREGS has firm instructions on how ships acknowledge one another and work out how to pass one another at sea. For now, all of that is worked out in verbal interaction between ship crews—something robot ships can’t currently do.

In its request, the Navy says that it wants to follow a three-phase development process. In the first phase, the goal will be to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept – especially the capacity to understand simple, common call ups like "Sea Hunter, this is Sun Princess; propose a port-to-port passage" when spoken by native English speakers.

Phase II of the project will include adding VHF radio capability, and understanding non-native English speakers. Phase III will involve taking the entire effort and making a usable system that can be deployed on the Navy’s robotic warships.
According to New Atlas, the talking robotic ship effort will go like this:

Re: Video Url: https://youtu.be/kMKul4M1Gng

The U.S. Navy wants to add ten new large robotic warships over the next ten years. The ships will act as scouts for other ships and multi-ship task forces, hosting sensors like radar and sonar that will extend the detection range of the fleet. Eventually the ships will carry weapons, acting as floating magazines for manned warships, but Congress has forbade the Navy from adding weapons to unmanned warships for now.

Source: New Atlas
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Personal note: I'm always a skeptic. Now more so - because of all the high tech that is available around the world and growing each day. Hacker(s) will love trying to take over an armed U.S. Navy vessel and turn it on us. They could become rogue killer's at sea if controlled by others.

An E.M.P. burst could knock out all communications (of the ship) so that it could be rewired or programmed to become a devastating weapon for the bad guys. Sorry - But I always think (outside the box) or about what others can do with such high tech designs - and more so - those on-board weapons that could be turned and used on us.

Plus all the high technology that they could possibly reversed engineer - giving them even more options to be used against us.

Your thoughts:

Boats

We could possibly incorporate a self-destruct program if the motherboard is corrupted by external sources. Since it isn't carrying live personnel the only loss would be a capital ship of which is money down the drain.