[dheera]

Rough calculations: 1 truck is 2 TEU/1 driver; 1 ship is 15K TEU/15 crew members. Time shifts and speed differences aside, ships are several hundred times more efficient than trucks in terms of TEU per unit human labor.

I could believe human labor being 44% of the cost of operating a ship, but the cost of operating a ship is also next to nothing. It's the last mile that engulfs these costs. Economically speaking it may not make a lot of sense to make ships autonomous.

But making ships autonomous is probably a lot easier than cars or airplanes, and could probably considered low-hanging fruit in the tech world. You don't need fancy computer vision algorithms to deal with a ship; GPS alone will probably do. Ships don't get within several hundred meters or even kilometers of each other.