The Inland Autopilot Gets the Engine, and One of Its Numbers Was Checked by Someone Else

Rotterdam-based Shipping Technology has launched ST Sailing Pro, an extension of its ST Sailing track pilot for inland vessels. Until now the system steered. Now it also controls propulsion.

It works like this. The captain casts off and manoeuvres out by hand. Then he or she switches the system on and enters a destination and an arrival time. From there the system keeps calculating the course and engine power needed to arrive on time, taking account of locks, currents, water levels and squat (the way a hull sinks lower in shallow water at speed). The company says the possible arrival window can move by up to three hours depending on conditions. The captain approves what the system proposes, such as whether to overtake, hold back, or arrive earlier or later.

This is not a lab product. Shipping Technology started collecting vessel data in 2018 and added automatic rudder control five years ago. Its equipment now runs on more than 400 vessels, and ST Sailing alone runs on about 200, with more than 315,000 sailing hours and 4.4 million kilometres logged. Propulsion control was tested first on a thruster-driven river cruise ship, then for six months on a single conventional vessel under a Smart Shipping permit, and is now in trials across dry cargo, tanker and passenger vessels. It works at level 2 of the Rhine Commission's automation scale: the captain supervises at all times and can take over at any moment.

Now the part that made us lead with it. The existing ST Sailing product claims a 5% fuel saving, and that figure was validated by Rijkswaterstaat, part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, in certified field testing. That is a government body with nothing to sell, measuring a result on real vessels. After weeks of this newsletter asking for independently checked numbers, this is the cleanest one we have found.

And the part we must be honest about. The new product claims a further 10% on top of that 5%. That figure is the company's own, from trials, and it has not been through the same check. It may well hold. But the right way to read this announcement is: one number checked, one number promised. A buyer should treat them differently.

Why a deep-sea manager should care about river barges. Inland shipping is where "the machine drives, the human decides" is being tested at volume on ordinary commercial vessels with ordinary engines and gearboxes, not on showcase newbuilds. The idea of giving the system an arrival time instead of a speed is exactly the just-in-time arrival logic that ports and charterers keep asking ocean-going ships for. It is running in daily service on the Rhine first. [Smart Maritime Network · SWZ Maritime · MarineLink]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 20 September 2026.