Chinese Firm Develops ‘Intelligent’ High-Speed Ship Drones

China’s Yunzhou Tech has developed an unmanned high-speed vessel that has achieved a breakthrough in its dynamic cooperative confrontation technology, which could quickly intercept, besiege and expel invasive targets.

Compared with manned vessels, ship drones have the advantages of low cost, multiple functions, strong scalability, high mobility and long duration. They can adapt to special and extreme environments, and they have huge advantages in maritime development and rights protection, semi-official Global Times reported on Sunday.

A video posted by the company shows six high-speed unmanned vessels cruising and guarding Chinese sea territory in a highly dynamic, complex environment. They conduct collaborative perception, high-speed tracking, evidence collection, interception and expelling unknown targets at sea. During the whole process, the ship drone swarms can make decisions completely on their own.

In 2018, the company carried out a collaborative demonstration of a 56-boat unmanned swarm in a Chinese sea area, where it verified the effectiveness of route planning, formation control and conflict resolution algorithms within the cluster, and demonstrated small unmanned ship simulations of large surface targets and multi-formation autonomous transformation technology, setting a world record for unmanned ship swarms.

Cheng Liang, general manager of Yunzhou Tech, told the news outlet that a mother ship, the world's first research ship capable of intelligent remote control and autonomous navigation, will be put into operation next year. The ship will be the world's first mother ship to realize the coordinated operation of aerial, surface and underwater unmanned systems.