Unmanned Ships: Navigation and More

Abstract

The paper briefly overviews the development of unmanned surface ship technology over the last 20 years. Main problems of their navigation equipment and algorithms, and their compliance with the International Maritime Organization requirements are discussed.

Autonomous ships and the collision avoidance regulations: a licensed deck officer survey

“…This vessel can be operated remotely, autonomously, or with people onboard. If trials are proven successful, the intent is to develop a larger autonomous ship of 10,000 TEU (Rivkin 2021). The UK's Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) is in the process of recreating the original wooden three-mast Mayflower's historical journey across the Atlantic, but this time fully autonomous (Anderson 2020).…”

“…However, as the COLREGs are written for manned vessels, some of the current rules present problems (Porathe 2019;Pedersen et al 2020). Many SMEs believe that the COLREGs need to be amended for MASS implementation as they cannot fully comply as they are currently written (Komianos 2018;Hirst 2020;Rivkin 2021). According to Zhou et al (2020), they should be amended, but not substantially changed.…”

“…One standing issue of applying the COLREGs to MASS is that the COLREGs are often ambiguous depending on the situation (Porathe 2018;Rivkin 2021). For example, the interpretation of "early," "substantial," "as soon as it becomes apparent," "finds herself so close that collision cannot be avoided by the action of the give-way vessel alone," "action as will best aid to avoid collision," and "if the circumstances at the case admit" are left up to the interpretation of the person navigating the vessel (Porathe 2019).…”

“…Possible solutions from the literature review include defining and quantifying "early" and "substantial." To determine quantified terms, researchers can conduct large MASS deep learning studies using AIS information (Porathe 2019;Rivkin 2021). If correctly programmed a quantified CPA and TCPAI, a MASS a collision avoidance system can interpret the wording and meaning of the COLREG terms (Ringbom 2019).…”

“…Various autonomous shipping projects and technologies are continually being developed and tested around the world (Mallam et al 2020;Fan et al 2021;Kim and Schröder-Hinrichs 2021). As MASS research proliferates, International Maritime Organization (IMO) instruments such as the Collision Avoidance Regulations (COLREGs) need to be examined as barriers are created when these rules of navigation are applied to autonomous ships (Perera 2019;Chang et al 2020;Zhou et al 2020;Rivkin 2021). Current collision avoidance systems are not always fully COLREGs compliant (Lyu and Yin 2019), especially during complex navigation scenarios (Johansen et al 2016).…”