But, of course, the actual navigation of driverless cars (as in, how to steer the wheels and modulate the accelerator/brakes) is probably mostly trivial. The hard parts are detecting paths, junctions, signs, obstacles, etc. and behaving predictably so as to cooperate with other drivers.
I’m sure the actual navigation of sailing vessels is more complicated than cars, but I can’t imagine that experienced sailors and talented programmers and engineers would have much trouble working out an algorithm.
But clearly they do! That's what the entire article is about. Boats also have to deal with other boats - not as much, but it's definitely there, and the results of getting it wrong tend to be worse. alkonaut's question was, basically, what's hard about this compared to driverless cars? My claim is that you have roughly the same requirements (yes, including paths and obstacles) but way more variables.
That’s true but navigating in and around ports isn’t part of this competition it’s 100% open water sailing. The start lines are defined as lines of longitude with an autonomous run up of 40 nautical miles before hitting the start latitude and it’s roughly from a ways off the coast of Newfoundland to off the north coast of Spain both well away from land.
They demonstrate it is not _impossible_ to have ship to ship collisions, but considering how rare these events are they tell us more about the state of seaman skills in the navy than about navigational hazards.
The collisions weren't really "near" any port, and were due to really shitty ship handling by the person in charge, possibly due to how the navy treats its sailors.
I’m sure the actual navigation of sailing vessels is more complicated than cars, but I can’t imagine that experienced sailors and talented programmers and engineers would have much trouble working out an algorithm.