Rolls-Royce’s Vision of Future Ship Navigation Looks Like Star Trek

The future of marine and offshore navigation may not be as awesome as flying an F/A-18 Super Hornet, but Rolls-Royce did a really good job at making it look that way.

Rolls-Royce just released an overview of the future bridge operation experience concept (oX) today, developed in cooperation with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, which provides a glimpse of new technology which could become reality by 2025.

Oskar Levandar, VP Innovation, Engineering & Technology at Rolls-Royce says one of the keys to future cost savings by ship owners will be reducing the number of crew on board the vessel.  To do that however, the onboard systems must be “smarter,” to operate automatically, and provide a much more easier to understand user interface.

Advancing technology, such as the oX concept, will also enable much safer and efficient operations as well.

This is the entire premise of their “Ship Intelligence” concept.

Building on that, Rolls-Royce believes “unmanned ships will be one of the most fundamental changes that we will experience in shipping in our lifetimes.”

The following video shows what this new oX technology looks like aboard a merchant ship:

And for PSVs, here’s how it would apply to the offshore sector:

What do you think?

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