China’s Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) has won unanimous approval from the country’s Acceptance Expert Group to move forward with its unmanned ship development project.
The “Unmanned Multifunctional Maritime Ships Research and Development Project” started in 2012, and has been implemented and organized by the project management unit of Zhejiang MSA with Wuhan University of Technology as project undertaking unit.
After 3 years, the project has completed the development and has won 4 national patents.
The project focuses on developing non-stop networked sea supervision, intelligent cruise and rescue, motorized multipoint coverage by shore-vessel based detection and control platform managing a certain amount of unmanned cruise and rescue vessels on a low-cost basis, which would effectively improve the ability and efficiency in maritime cruise and rescue.
MSA says that the system could be used in its maritime system, as well as the systems of ocean, fishery administration, weather, border defense, military, etc.