I’m not sure how big the difference is on auto-pilot between marinecrafts and aircrafts, so apologies for including both in the question.
It sounds like it makes the ship/plane run itself, without any need for a person to control it, but how could that be the case? These machinaries sound like they should be steered and watched at all times. It sounds dangerous to leave them on an “auto” mode.
Is there an in-depth explaination behind what auto-pilot does? What are its limits? Is it possible to go wrong in some way, and if so, does it have some kind of alarm?
In: Technology
If you think of a big ship there are lots of people on the bridge who control the ship. You have the helmsman controlling the rudder, the machinist controlling the engines, left and right watchmen to look out for traffic, navigator to make sure the ship is going the right way, etc. The captain is not actually touching any of the controls but are just monitoring everything and making decisions when needed. On a smaller boat a single person might do several of these jobs at the same time but they are still jobs that needs to be done by someone.
An autopilot is a mechanism which is able to automatically do one or more of these tasks. Specifically the helmsman. The job of a helmsman is to look at a compass and adjust the rudder so the compass reads what they are ordered to. The helmsman does not even have to be on the bridge and a lot of ships actually do have the helmsman on a lower deck so they have less visibility. So it is quite easy to replace them with a mechanical or electrical device. On larger ships you can eliminate a crew member and on smaller boats you give more time for the crew to do other tasks, such as looking out for traffic and monitoring the boat.
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