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to monitor and clamp down on energy use and emissions. That means energy management systems must increasingly capture data on board, and transfer it ashore for it to be processed to generate reports on efficiency. This ‘digitisation’ of ship powertrains will be as critical to the development of large autonomous ships as it is to smaller USVs such as the WasteShark, as it will provide a sizeable set of historical statistical data, from which trends and predictions of ship reliability can be drawn. “More standardised and reliable ships will be essential if they are to operate at sea for several weeks without onboard engineers,” Tenuovo says. Returning to the subject of navigation and control capabilities, a collaboration was announced in 2017 between Rolls- Royce and the European Space Agency to develop and validate space-based solutions for remote and autonomous shipping. As Tenuovo notes, satellite comms and related technologies have not been developed and designed with commercial remote and autonomous vessel operations in mind. The realisation of untapped resources in the ocean is generating a new wave of unmanned ship designs. Some of these take advantage of the absence of a crew on board by using the freed- up space as a bay for UAVs, UUVs or cargo; others are aimed at bridging the gap between manned and unmanned missions, in many cases so that control and navigation can progress from human operators to full autonomy. Sensors such as IMUs, Lidar, sonar, radar, and optical cameras with machine learning systems for object recognition and collision avoidance continue to advance. That means architectures for replacing human awareness surrounding vessels can be designed freely. The next step is to ensure that hulls, maintenance and telemetry can handle the environments and mission lengths that USVs are increasingly expected to weather, in the absence of humans or combustion engines.