The U.S. Navy is preparing to enter the world of robotic warships.

For safety’s sake, robot ships need to be able to converse with human sailors on other ships.

The technology will require not only understanding human speech but also interacting with humans.

The U.S. Navy is embarking on an effort to turn at least some ships of the battle fleet into unmanned, robot warriors. One problem with unmanned ships: they must still interact with civilian ships, particularly in congested waterways. The Navy’s goal is ships that not only understand queries from human sailors on nearby ships but can also talk with those humans how their two ships, one manned the other unmanned, will pass one another safely.

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The U.S. Navy realizes that unmanned ships must still be able to abide by the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS). COLREGS has firm instructions on how ships acknowledge one another and work out how to pass one another at sea. For now, all of that is worked out in verbal interaction between ship crews—something robot ships can’t currently do.

According to New Atlas, the talking robotic ship effort will go like this:

In its request, the Navy says that it wants to follow a three-phase development process. In the first phase, the goal will be to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept – especially the capacity to understand simple, common call ups like "Sea Hunter, this is Sun Princess; propose a port-to-port passage" when spoken by native English speakers.

Phase II of the project will include adding VHF radio capability, and understanding non-native English speakers. Phase III will involve taking the entire effort and making a usable system that can be deployed on the Navy’s robotic warships.

The U.S. Navy wants to add ten new large robotic warships over the next ten years. The ships will act as scouts for other ships and multi-ship task forces, hosting sensors like radar and sonar that will extend the detection range of the fleet. Eventually the ships will carry weapons, acting as floating magazines for manned warships, but Congress has forbade the Navy from adding weapons to unmanned warships for now.

Source: New Atlas.