ROBOT ON WATCH

Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare still rings true at sea as owners of displacement-only trawler yachts will be only to happy to tell you. When transiting on a lengthy passage from somewhere like the UK to the Med at the same time as a much faster planing yacht, they will often watching the faster boat speed off into the distance only to see it slope into Gibraltar several days after they’ve arrived. That’s because while the planing boat has been coast-hopping from port to port, spending the nights in marinas, the trawler yacht has been plodding along day and night without even stopping for fuel.

It’s a salutary lesson in slow and steady winning the race but it comes at a cost – the need for someone to stay on watch all through the night with a rota to allow everyone to get some sleep. But what if you could leave the graveyard shift to a robot watchkeeper with eyes that can see in the dark and an artificial brain that can recognise potential threats long before the human eye could