Autonomous environmentally friendly waterways transport

Social Business name: Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV) Waterways Transport Services.

The problem statement: Currently 90% of global cargo transportation occurs via waterways, which has a large carbon footprint due to vessel’s emissions. International shipping’s carbon footprint is unlikely to change anytime soon as it adheres to traditions which are difficult to change. 

Moreover most waterways transportation occurs in a very centralized way. Our solution provides a viable, disruptive, more environmentally friendly and decentralized shipping service for both local and global waterways. 

Big idea: Develop, manufacture and operate autonomous solar and/ or wind powered sailing unmanned/uncrewed surface vessels (USV) similar to USA’s Saildrone or UK’s oceandrone.tech made of sustainable materials, incorporating bamboo and jute. 

These USVs which can operate 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, 365-days a year autonomous operations in all sea conditions for shipping. The development of these USV using decentralized digital manufacturing, will lead to P2P and B2P shipping on waterways all over the world thereby  opening up new frontiers and making more waterways accessible to global shipping.

Moreover our USVs will help reduce global CO₂ levels as they are solar and/ or wind powered. Their smaller size relative to mega container ships makes them not only operational in more remote areas of the world but they also have a lower environmental footprint. 

How I plan to do business: Provide waterways transport services using international standard, environmentally friendly and reliable autonomous shipping both locally and eventually globally. We will sell, lease and rent out our USV depending on the market demand to make money. 

We intend to provide waterways shipping services, both FCL and LCL. This competitive priced shipping service will lead to getting market share and profit in the competitive global shipping service. It’s also likely to lead to both P2P and B2C shipping services due to it’s smaller size than traditional shipping which means we can solve a significant part of the problems faced in global shipping while making sufficient profits to sustain the social business that we can utilize to address more global supply chain challenges.

 

Around 40% of the world population lives within 100km of coastal area according to the UN. As the world population grows, the strain on shipping ports choke points increases. The conventional wisdom is to build ever bigger ships and expand ports, however such activities lead to further challenges like the Ever Given ship getting stuck in the Suez canal and causing global shipping chaos and the third largest port in the world Ningbo-Zhoushan stopping operations due to the covid. As one can understand, there’s a need for an alternative type of shipping which should be p2p and decentralized, so that more people can be served effortlessly.  

The idea is to use sailing drones which are autonomous to ship cargo worldwide through ocean and water tributaries, where it can serve the vast majority of the world population. Sail drones have been produced by a handful of companies and individuals in a few countries  world wide but their use has been limited to collecting critical data from the Ocean. These drones are able to sail in harsh ocean conditions including hurricanes and typhoons; which means they will be able to survive carrying parcels and courier them to people. 

This social business aims to evaluate the possibility of using fablabs to decentralize manufacturing of sailing drones, to disrupt ocean shipping. Our aim is nothing short of revolutionizing society by using the creativity of the global innovative crowd, through small and medium enterprises and do shipments p2p and b2p, thereby circumventing large shipping oligopolies and create a new gig economy where stakeholders thrive due to a new paradigm in shipping to more people and places through remote waterways.

These drones are powered by sail or solar power and can sail autonomously with almost unlimited range. Some of the problems that will be solved by utilizing them for shipping include elimination of pollution as they neither emit sulfur and carbon dioxide nor cause issues with marine environment since they don’t need ballast water. Moreover due to digital manufacturing and socio-technical change will take place as these drones are used for shipping. 

The ever growing fab lab network keeps gaining technological depth and breadth as well as cutting edge equipment which will likely produce durable high quality sail drones that lead to disruption and socio-technical change.