I am not really sure they have ventured into the unmanned arena yet. It seems as though you could program a submersible to hit a certain lat/long and have it pop up for recovery by a boat that could either unload it or tow it to land. It is an intriguing thought and I am sure if others have thought of it so have the cartels.
OTOH, would using an autonomous submersible be considered too risky when you are talking cargo worth a quarter of a billion dollars? Another thought, why go autonomous when you obviously can crew the ones you have? Paying a crew, giving them a GPS, food, and water is probably cheaper than trying to automate one of those things.
Interesting discussion.
bob
Well...
in theory, a $9 Arduino, or $40 Raspberry Pi, with a few hundred bucks in COTS GPS sensors, relays, and servos right from Amazon is all you'd need.
In practice, making it
hardened, reliable, and redundant would be much more difficult, but not
impossible. The redundancy part is easy, just buy three of the microcontrollers, and have three sets of wiring and sensors. Admittedly, the coding for cross checking and fail-over modes gets significantly harder. We have a few members here who could probably make a very credible stab at it, assuming all other aspects of the boat, sub, or semi-sub were done properly. Paying off a few South American, American, hell, given the Internet, really anywhere in the world... the operational security to find comp-sci grad students to design it, instead of running screaming to the authorities is probably the hardest part.
Something going wrong in terms of mechanical failure, not having a mechanic to adjust or fix the diesel engine for instance might be the biggest stumbling block, but it could get to the point that if the cartels could actually set up a production line sufficient to gain some sort of economy of scale, and send so many autonomous ones that a certain percentage of losses vs. manned boats becomes acceptable.
There's other limitations of course, avoiding/evading other vessels, even an accidental contact, much less Navy or Coast Guard is nigh impossible, although there's even some possibilities there, with cameras and motion or object detection. And it seems that the manned ones have very limited ability in this regard already.
It's really now at the point where kids play with tools so powerful for so cheap, that the real limit is design and coding ability, and project managment to make it all come together.
