Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and the COLREGS: Do We Need Quantified Rules Or Is “the Ordinary Practice of Seamen” Specific Enough?

Abstract

Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) is currently on the agenda in several countries and also in the IMO. In Norway a 120 TEU container feeder is being build and will start sailing autonomously in 2022. The challenge is huge. One question is whether or not the present, quantitative, collision regulations needs to be updated to rules where expressions as "early" and "substantial" are quantified? Or if ships can sail autonomously under the present rules? Another question is if MASS should be marked to signal that the ship is in autonomous mode? Or if it is enough that she follows COLREGS? This discussion paper will take a closer look at these questions and advocate automation transparency, meaning that the behavior of an autonomous vessel has to make sense and be understandable to human operators on other manned ships and crafts. http://www.transnav.eu the International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea Transportation Volume 13 Number 3

Unmanned Ships: Navigation and More

“…This problem is discussed in [42], which poses the following obvious questions. Should then COLREGs be modified, and if no, are they sufficient to ensure safe autonomous navigation?…”

“…People are prone to be anthropomorphic, i.e., attribute human traits, emotions, and intentions to non-human entities. Therefore the author of [42] supposes that UMS must have a special symbol displayed by AIS on ECNIS or radar. However, this is not a panacea.…”

Rules required for operating maritime autonomous surface ships from the viewpoint of seafarers

“…According to Zhou et al (2020), in order to solve the problem of misinterpretation of COLREGs, amendment of the ‘look-out’ rule (COLREGs Rule 5) is needed to permit watch keeping solely via ‘computer vision’ alone. Other research on this topic carried out by Porathe (2019) indicates that AI may actually become more proficient than humans, so the software installed on MASS should focus on behaving in a more humanlike manner. In addition, Pritchett (2015) states that a look-out is ‘both eyes and ears of the ship’, and the current inability of these fully autonomous models to comply with navigational rules raises practical and legal concerns.…”

“…Also, 68% (89) of respondents requested the installation of shapes or lights (Table 9). Porathe (2019) points out the following: ‘In my opinion it is therefore important that ships navigation in autonomous mode show some kind of identification signal.’ See Table 10.…”

“…Regarding these points, Porathe (2019) comments that ‘for a programmer programming the collision avoidance module of an autonomous navigation software the difficulty is not only in judging which action, but also when to execute it “early” and “substantially”.’…”