Rolls-Royce is working on crewless ships -- drone freighters, basically -- in an attempt to make shipping safer, cheaper and cleaner.
Rolls-Royce's "Blue Ocean" team is running a virtual reality prototype in a Norway office that mimics the 360-degree view that an onboard crew would see from a ship's bridge.
It is conceivable that the ships will be deployed in regions such as the Baltic Sea within a decade. However, unmanned ships at present are illegal, so there will need to be both a regulatory and technological revolution before drone freighters are floating around.
A crew on a freighter costs more than $3,300 per day and accounts for 44 percent of total operating expenses.
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