Innovative Autonomous Maritime ISO-Container Vehicles AMISOC Vehicles

Abstract

Abstract The maritime world has been facing difficulty "last mile" logistic dilemmas of natural/manmade access barriers, lack of infrastructure, shallow waters, elevated sea states, adverse weather conditions (e.g., storms, foggy/misty, lightlessness, windy, stormy, or icy/snowy), unknown bathymetry, etc. The industries facing such dilemma have included (1) offshore petroleum exploration/production; (2) offshore mining other than petroleum; (3) marine pollution abatement; (4) humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR); (5) offshore firefighting and search and rescue (SAR); (6) offshore energy generation, storage and transmission; and (7) military sectors. A new breed of Autonomous Maritime ISO-Container Vehicles (AMISOC Vehicles) has been invented for effectively solving the above decade-old "last mile" logistic dilemmas. Another dilemma also facing the maritime industries is the ship-to-ship, ship-to-platform or platform-to-ship transfer of cargos at sea. These cargo transfer operations at sea are expensive, difficult to perform and risky which have plagued reliable, efficient and cost-effective sustainment of offshore petroleum exploration/production platforms under adverse weather periods and/or at elevated sea states (e.g., >3+). To be more fully presented in this paper hereinafter, unique and innovative autonomous/unmanned vehicles that are container-box based (or AMISOC vehicles) and their companion technology known as in-situ launch and recovery devices (LRDs) (remotely controllable) have been invented to inexpensively and reliably solve the above critical maritime dilemmas offshore.