Autonomous Ship Challenges
Cristian Alvaro ALBA ARRIETA
MSc. CSNE
IMT Atlantique
Brest, France
Cristian-alvaro.alba-arrieta@imt-atlantique.net
Abstract— This paper discusses about the main elements
involved in the development of autonomous ships, there are many
challenges to be overcome by the promotors of autonomous ships.
Connectivity and control are the main points to mention but also
there are elements that developers should consider and not all of
them are technological issues.
Keywords—Autonomous Ships; Autonomous Vessels;
Connectivity; Control; Unmanned ships.
I. INTRODUCTION
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) mentions
that currently there are around 50 thousand registered merchant
ships in more than 150 nations of the world that carry a load
equivalent to more than 90% of world trade, however, they
pointed out that members of the logistics sector require more
professional labor to guarantee the success of the management,
in a profitable, clean, safe and sustainable context.
Shipbuilding industry is promoting autonomous ships, to face
the current problems and improve the existing characteristics.
Nowadays it is expected that the human is the one who
interacts and controls the ship. In fact, the human is expected to
perform the established operations as well as take the decisions
under different situations, overall scenarios but also for
unforeseen events such as alarms or malfunctions.
Shipping companies wants to improve the operational
efficiency through the introduction of very economic ships as a
means to guarantee a safe transport and the competitiveness of
the costs under intense market competition. Adding to this the
fast growing of IT technologies, is making the development of
autonomous ships a reality. According to [1] remotely operated
local ships are expected by 2020 and ocean-going ships for
maritime transport by 2030. But we have already some
projects, for example the MUNIN project [2], which is the
project to establish the concept of Unmanned Ship and is
pushing for the development of fully automated ships by 2035,
finished in 2016, is taken as reference for many investigations.
An autonomous ship must have the capacity to monitor its
status as well as the environment that surrounds it, send this
information and be able to make decisions based on that,
without human supervision. For critical cases, it can be
performed by a remote operator on the shore. This kind of
ships will redefine the works roles, for example the new role of
remote operators in a shore control center (SCC), that will
monitor and act as virtual captains of many ships
simultaneously.
Praveen DOKUR
MSc. DS
IMT Atlantique
Brest, France
Praveen.dokur@imt-atlantique.net
The E-Navigation defined by the IMO as information
collected, integrated, exchanged, presented and analyzed
onboard and at shore, to reinforce the control of the ship’s
navigation, raise up related services for safety and security at
sea, and protect the maritime environment, this new mode of
navigation is the main idea to start the development the future
of navigation at sea and with this comes the technology for
autonomous ships.
A key component of autonomous ships is the connectivity,
as we can see in [1] this component must be reliable,
bidirectional, scalable, precise and must be redundant to avoid
risks. Also, new connectivity solutions must have enough
capacity to deal with all necessities of the new systems that will
be involved in autonomous ships. However, by the time there
are many challenges that does not have approach to get
solutions.
This document focuses mainly on the challenges of
connectivity and management but also discusses other issues
that are involved in the development of autonomous ships as
legal, economic and security concern. We start making a
differentiation between autonomous and unmanned ships and
then we develop the different points already mentioned.
II. AUTONOMOUS AND UNMANNED
Following the definition given in [3] an autonomous ship
has a level of automation and self-governance. Automation is
referred to the process that permits to ships do certain
operations without human control. Then, autonomy is the result
of new automation techniques that allows ships have some self-
governance, it means that ships can make decisions without
consulting the human [4]. In our study we focus on bridge
automation, because engines and technical systems have
already been automated.
Autonomous means that the ship can make many
operations defined without human care or with a reduced care
of the crew. It does not mean that no human is present on the
ship. Unmanned means that there is no human present on the
bridge to perform or supervise operations. Crew may still be on
board, and the ship may not be autonomous because it could be
remotely controlled by the SCC. By combining the definitions
of autonomous and unmanned ships [4] we can obtain the
following summary table.
 Table. I. Ship Autonomy Types [4]
III. ELEMENTS INVOLVED IN AUTONOMOUS SHIPS
As described at the beginning of the article, to produce
autonomous ships, we should take into account many elements.
And not all these elements are related to technology, but there
are also some social elements that must be considered, we will
describe that most significant ones.
Economic benefits, as shown in [5], considering the new
technologies to be used, the cost of the new designs for the
ships, the considerable decrease in crew, as well as the creation
of new jobs, it can be said that the autonomous ships will mean
a decrease in costs, which leads to a profit in the shipping
companies. Of course, this has some degree of uncertainty
given by the developments, that are not completed and will
depends on the progress in areas that have not yet been
covered, as some detectors and redundancy systems.
Environment and energy consumption, following the
analysis made on [6] by reducing the crew drastically, facilities
and equipment used for crew will be eliminated or reduced
significantly. This will result in reduction of power consumed
and reduction of GHG’s(Greenhouse Gas) emissions. Also, the
reduction of fuel consumed is linked to the improvement of the
engines and on-board systems, calculations made in [6] shows
the great amount of fuel that could be saved by the autonomous
ships.
Human element, according to [7], safety is the most
important thing for autonomous and unmanned ships, the
introduction of new technologies will affect safety, improving
some aspects and getting worse others. The goal of
autonomous ships will be more safety than a regular manned
ship. Also, the new form of interaction between autonomous
and manned ships should be into account. New algorithms
acting as the human behavior to make decisions, should be
improved. The human element will not disappear, including its
mistakes; but not directly in the operation of ships, now in the
programming and configuration of software.
Safety and security systems, the principal points for
security are losing data, change of data and hijacking of data
[1]. Therefore, autonomous ships must have good protocols for
cyber security and mechanism to avoid any of these events. In
case of the use of satellites, this must have features to change
the band to follows the communication or shield the link in all
directions except the mean bean. Something important in the
safety and security systems are fail-to-safe procedures, which
allows to use redundant communication, in case of unexpected
events as failure or hijacking. Communication does in this
context also include radio-navigation, including Global
Satellite Navigation Systems (GNSS).
AIS (Automatic Identification System), is a
communication standard, it transmits radio signals containing
position and identification data of the ship to aid in navigation
and collision avoidance. This information nowadays is not
enough. For the implementation of autonomous ships new
technologies should appear as VDES (VHF Data Exchange
System) that allows to enhance maritime communication
applications, based on robust and efficient digital transmission
at a much higher rate (up to 32x) than AIS.
COLREGS (Collision Regulations), according to [8] it is
possible to achieve algorithms capable of being governed by
the COLREGS norms, this will allow the autonomous ships to
recognize when there is a possible collision and to avoid this,
making enough maneuvers to be out of danger.
Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) and
Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS),
these are radio services that are used for ships in abnormal
situations or emergencies. The autonomous ship may need to
use these services and are also required to respond to them in
case of any emergency of an autonomous ship or a regular ship
near to its. This last point will be a complex challenge since the
autonomous ship will not have crew or will be reduced and
helping a ship in trouble would be unfeasible.
So far, we have seen several important points, now we
focus on deepening two neuralgic points for the development
of autonomous ships
IV. CONECTIVITY
A. Data requirements
As we know, autonomous ships will have many different
systems that needs to send and received information [9]. Table
II shows the size of one data block of uncompressed data from
the most relevant system as well as the usual update rate and
compressed data rate.
Table. II. Volume of Data from Ship Systems [9]
Also, ASC (Autonomous Ship Controller) updates will be
done regularly to adjust the ship's route or other parameters
needed. This can be used to review changes in weather,
destination or arrival times at the port. It is expected that this
will be done occasionally, for example, once a day and they
will need a lower load of data to the ship. Following this, it is
expected that the route information or the new thresholds will
be on the order of 100 bytes.
B. Availble Communication Systems
The operation areas for autonomous ships could be divided
in three: coast, deep sea, and port. For each of them
communication systems, maneuvers, control and management
will be totally different. In our case, we concentrate on the
analysis of operations on the deep sea, that means the use of
satellite constellations. There are two principal systems that we
will discuss.
Inmarsat is part of the Global Maritime Distress and Safety
System (GMDSS). According to this, it offers global beam
coverage in the L band (1-2 GHz) with a bandwidth of up to
432 kbps. Generally, we can consider that this give worldwide
coverage up to 70-80 degree latitude.
Inmarsat has other services as Ku and Ka. The Ka-band
service named Global Xpress will provide a better global
coverage with up to 50 Mbps down and 5 Mbps uplink to the
end user (http://www.groundcontrol.com/Global_Xpress.htm).
Iridium is the only operator of global connectivity,
operating in the L band, since it provides a large network of
satellites in low Earth orbit, included in polar orbits. Many of
the other systems operate with geostationary orbits and have no
coverage in Arctic and Antarctic areas. Iridium OpenPort
provides bidirectional data capacity of up to 134 kbps for the
end user (https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-pilot/).
There are other operators of VSAT systems, for example
Intelsat, that provides up to 4Mbps using C-Band. Other
providers have coverage in specific areas. In the future to talk
about a global service, there will be few suppliers. It also
important to refer to O3b Networks that has deployed a
Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite system with a coverage
up to 45 degrees latitude, this operates in Ka band with a high
capacity.
C. Communication Architecture And Solutions
Redundant communication links, in addition to the
mandatory systems discussed in section II (AIS, COLREGS,
SCC, MRCC, GMDSS) the following systems will be used for
autonomous ships:
A main communication channel based on a VSAT service
operating on some of the bands C, Ku, Ka. The capacity of the
link must be superior to 4Mbps to cover the addition of all the
bandwidth listed in TABLE II. This will allow the remote
control of the ship.
A backup channel based on L-band with capacity to cover
the main links in TABLE II but not the ones high capacity.
This must allow to make a remote management but restricted.
Also, a dedicated and independent communication channel
based on AIS or digital VHF. This enable to recover the ship
even if the rest of communications have failures. The use of
different bands for this link should be useful in case of signal
transit disturbance caused by adverse atmospheric
conditions.
Fig. 1. Proposed on board architecture [9]
The preceding image FIG.1 shows a topology proposed in
[9] this allows duplication of critical systems, use of two
independent satellite systems, The RCU (Rendezvous Control
Unit) used for data transmission over VHF, and AIS, is
disjointed of ASC to be sure that in case of failure it can
communicate and safely put crew onboard again.
Multiple SCC, to prevent failure related to communication
or system breakdown in the SCC, must be available for all the
ships in order to avoid these events. Then they need a reliable
handover protocol to ensure the fast and save change of
responsibilities between the SCC’s.
V. CONTROL AND MANAGEMENT
Autonomous Ship is developed by using IT technology,
brief research done on the components of existing ships, build
some useful functional elements that are researching and
developing by advanced shipbuilders and shipping companies,
here we are using IT technology building autonomous ship and
shore architecture. Autonomous systems may have different
levels of autonomy (LoA). Autonomy is a system's ability to
make independent decisions from a supervising agent and
execute these decisions. For conventional marine vessels, the
supervising operators are the crew. For maritime autonomous
ships, may be low manned or unmanned which creates
challenges in operation. The autonomous ship will influence
risk in relation to several marine stakeholders, the environment,
and the ship itself. Collisions and groundings contribute most
to the risk level for conventional ships. The autonomous ship
will be equipped with collision avoidance systems and sensory
equipment for safe operation. Moreover, the ship should at
least be as safe as conventional ships to be acceptable for use in
public ocean space.), only one or a few operators will take a
supervising role and intervene when necessary. These scales
define the decision authority and the tasks that the human
operators and the autonomous system carry out, implicitly
affecting risk. In this case, the term tasks refer to information
acquisition, information analysis, decision selection, and action
implementation. [10]
Wireless connectivity for unmanned and autonomous ship
using hybrid connectivity concepts (AIS and GMDSS).
A. Decision support systems: The monitoring of the
“health” of different vital functions on a vessel is today used
extensively by the ship owners and stakeholders. There is today
the possibility to monitor sensor data of important ship
functions, as for example engine, thrusters, and generators. The
real time sensor data is collected and analyzed with a focus on
the variations in the data set, with the objective of predicting
the function performance and future risk of malfunction. The
predictive system is an important issue for the vessel’s safety
concept and increases the awareness in an organization when
success fully planning for proactive maintenance. This type of
decision support systems will substantially increase the
operation performance and drastically decrease unexpected
malfunctions as well provide a trust in safe behavior in
offshore activities.
B. Master-slave concept: The concept of coordinating a
number of autonomous cargo vessels in a route can be very
effective when using a master ship as accompanying the
unmanned vessels. The master vessel is manned with personnel
that exhibit competences in traditional shipping, autonomous
technology as well as specific skills to handle both cooperative
planned activities as well as sudden, occurring events. The
operating management of the unmanned cargo ships can be
supervised and controlled by the master vessel in a safe and
secured manner. The master-slave concept organizes several
autonomous cargo vessels that are accompanied by a traditional
ship with extended control capability to handle unforeseen
alarms and events in the fleet. [11]
C. Captain on land concept: A command center on land is
an attractive solution to control ships and perform a safe sea
journey. The concept will have the possibility to reduce the
number of staff onboard the vessel significantly. The captain
and other skilled crew members in a traditional ship
organization can be fully operated from the on-land center. In
the future, the expected functions at the on-land operational
center can include the following interactions with the vessel
[11]:
• Operational support/monitoring/navigation systems
• Operational prediction/ and optimization systems
• Path tracking/planning/decision systems
• System maintenance
• Overall risk assessment
• System management
• Communication system
• Host server system
Automatic route generation of Navigation plan for
Autonomous or robotic surface vessel, and with help of AIS
Data like nearest neighbor-based path used for both ship and
Navigation feature.
Autonomous ships have received significant attention from
the academic community and industry in recent years. With
state-of-the-art technologies in relevant fields, such as robotics
and artificial intelligence, the aim of having fully autonomous
ships or platforms in ocean does not seem far away. This could
bring huge cost saving to industry by reducing needs for
manpower and human operator’s exposure to certain safety
risks.
One major aspect to consider for autonomous ships is
navigation. While collision avoidance systems have been
available for many years, the ability to generate reliable
navigation plans for ships remains as a challenge. On the other
hand, while historical Automatic Identification System (AIS)
data of ships around the world have been collected for years,
this huge amount of data is still under-utilized. Historical
Automatic Identification System (AIS) data is of significant
value to this problem. The method joins AIS locations of a
same vessel at different time and locations in a region into a
route. In essence, paths which have been taken by ships before
are good references or even candidates to consider for a new
navigation plan. One thing worth noting in this work is that
proposed method does not aim to compete with existing
algorithms for generation of navigation plan, but to work
together by augmenting with intelligence extracted from
existing AIS data.
The representation of a record that contains properties of
the ship and route is divided into two parts, namely Ship
Feature and Navigation Feature. [11]
Ship Feature and Navigation Feature
Ship Feature (SF) basically captures important properties
of ship and environment. In this work, due to limited access to
data, length, beam, minimum and maximum draft of a vessel
are taken into consideration. Analysis is done in four-
dimensional space.
Navigation Feature (NF) accounts for location
information. As AIS reports longitude and latitude information
per time interval, this location is recorded as two numbers in
NF.
Nearest neighbor-based route retrieval are presented in this
section. Similar to typical nearest neighbor-based approach,
there are two stages involved, pre-processing of existing data
and online search. In summary, this work has presented a
method for automated generation of navigation plan based on
historical AIS data. In the space of Ship Feature and
Navigation Feature, existing AIS data is transformed into input
vectors and corresponding routes. Given a query, nearest
neighbor-based route retrieval is performed for automated
navigation planning, based on a weighted distance. With
capacity of being expanded to higher-dimensional space, more
factors such as bathymetry and weather conditions can be
considered according to actual situation. [12]
Reducing Maritime-traffic is one of the biggest
challenges in autonomous ships and their autonomous
operation, and remote control, these ships need to communicate
with each other, with the vessel traffic system (VTS), with the
port state control (PSC) and with the shore control center
(SCC). For a sustainable maritime industry, the biggest
challenge will be the implementation of reliable and cost-
effective communication carrier to assure a continuous ships
connectivity. Here the contribution consists of quantifying and
classifying the data to be transferred, the identification of ship
mobility environment challenges, and the proposal of mobile
WiMAX as a reliable, secure and cost effective maritime
communication carrier. This communication carrier must be
suitable for the dense maritime traffic, where conventional
ships and autonomous ships will co-exist.
Services classification and communication requirements,
our approach for the quantification and classification of data to
be exchanged is based on the attendance of many CS and the
study of ship operational data, i.e. navigation, ship reporting,
cargo operation, emergency management, and crew
infotainment needs. The MUNIN project [2], has addressed the
importance of communication stream for the rendezvous
scenario, remote control, telemetry, radar and targets, and HD
video and estimated that a bandwidth of 4 Mbps is enough for
the implementation of autonomous ships.
Currently the ships need to send noon reports, position,
notification, orders, cargo data, maintenance records, engine
room data, bunker status. The FIG. 2, illustrates the data to be
exchanged between the ship and SCC, PSC, VTS, and ship
owner [13].
Fig. 2. Data to be exchanged with the shore side [13]
 VI. NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND TRENDS
As we already discuss there are many challenges to face
before we can have safe autonomous ships. We list some
innovations that could help in the development of autonomous
ships.
Maritime Internet of Things
New protocols as COAP and 6LoWPAN over VHF [14]
could make it possible its development, and have reliable links
on VHF, also in [15] new strategies are developed to use UHF
with good results.
Satellites integration to 5G
In [16] is studied the integration of satellites to 5G for IoT
narrowband services with low bitrate, that could be useful in
the future to get more connections simultaneously and
depending on the development in this area could manage high
bitrate.
New projects
The Norwegian Forum for Autonomous Ships
(http://nfas.autonomous-ship.org/projects-en.html) is a good
source to get this information, some projects are:
- MAMIME: World's first Maritime 5G communication
project, funded by Norwegian Research Council,
2016-2019, is the world's first 5G maritime
communication research project.
- Yara Birkeland, will be the world's first fully electric
and autonomous container ship, with zero emissions.
With this vessel, Yara will reduce diesel-powered truck
haulage by 40,000 journeys a year.
- Online risk management and risk control for
autonomous ships ORCAS, will develop novel
technological solutions for online risk management and
risk control of autonomous ships.
VII. DISCUSSION
The more relevant part is the human element involved in
the management of ships. As it is obvious, the number of crew
will decrease considerately, affecting the jobs of many
workers, this must be taken into account by the developers.
The technological and regulatory issues are also important,
because without connectivity, management and rules to be
followed by ships it is impossible to get a reliable autonomous
ship. The discussion of the benefits and cons will continue until
credible results are obtained in the different technologies that
can be used.
VII. CONCLUSSION
For everything discussed in the paper, it can be said that the
development of autonomous ships will advance in the
following years. The industry promotes this great development
and thanks to the technological advances of the last years, and
despite the detractors, making an analogy with autonomous
cars, it is impossible to stop it. The autonomous ships are
becoming more and more real thanks to the effort of different
actors that are interesting in its development.
REFERENCES
[1] M. Höyhtyä, J. Huusko, M. Kiviranta, K. Solberg and J. Rokka,
"Connectivity for Autonomous Ships: Architecture, Use Cases, and
Research Challenges", International Conference on Information and
Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC), Oct 2017.
[2] “MUNIN PROJECT” European Union, 2016.
[3] Ø. Rødseth, Å Tjora “A system architecture for an unmanned ship”, The
13th International Conference on Computer and IT Applications in the
Maritime Industries (COMPIT 2014), At Redworth, UK, 2014.
[4] Ø. Rødseth, H. Nordahl “Definition for autonomous merchant ships”,
Norwegian Forum For Autonomous Ships, Norway, Oct. 2017.
[5] L. Kretschmann, H. Burmeister, C. Jahn “Analyzing the economic
benefit of unmanned autonomous ships: An exploratory cost-comparison
between an autonomous and a conventional bulk carrier”, Research in
Transportation Business & Management, Volume 25, Pages 76-86, Dec
2018.
[6] A. Ait Allal, K. Mansouri, M. Youssfi and M. Qbadou “Toward energy
saving and environmental protection by implementation of autonomous
ship”, 19th IEEE Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference
(MELECON), Pages: 177 – 180, 2018.
[7] S. Ahvenjärvi “The Human Element and Autonomous Ships”,
International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea
Transportation, Volume 10, Number 3, Finland, Sept. 2016.
[8] J. Mei, M. Arshad “COLREGs based navigation of riverine Autonomous
Surface Vehicle” IEEE International Conference on Underwater System
Technology: Theory and Applications (USYS), Penang, Malaysia, April
2016.
[9] Ø. Rødseth, B. Kvamstad, T. Porathe “Communication Architecture for
an Unmanned Merchant Ship”, IEEE OCEANS – Bergen, Hamburg,
Germany 2013.
[10] C. Thieme, I. Bouwer Utne, S. Haugen “Assessing ship risk model
applicability to Marine Autonomous Surface Ships” Ocean Engineering,
Volume 165, Pages 140-154, October 2018.
[11] B. Batalden, P. Leikanger, P. Wide “Towards Autonomous Maritime
operations” 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational
Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and
Applications (CIVEMSA), France, June 2017
[12] A. Allal; K. Mansouri; M. Youssfi; M. Qbadou “Toward a new maritime
communication system in Detroit of Gibraltar where conventional and
autonomous ships will co-exist” International Conference on Wireless
Networks and Mobile Communications (WINCOM), Morocco, 2017.
[13] Wei Chian Tan, Ching-Yen Weng , Yu Zhou , Kie Hian Chua and I-
Ming Chen “Historical Data is Useful for Navigation Planning:Data
Driven Route Generation for Autonomous Ship” IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Australia, May 2018
[14] D. Palma, “Enabling the Maritime Internet of Things: CoAP and
6LoWPAN performance over VHF links” IEEE Internet Of Things
Journal, 2018.
[15] K. Nybom, W. Lund, S. Lafond, J. Lilius, J. Björkqvist, K. Suominen,
K. Tuulos “IoT at Sea” IEEE International Symposium on Broadband
Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB), Finland, 2018.
[16] M. Gineste, T. Deleu, M. Cohen, N. Chuberre, V. Saravanan, V.
Frascolla, M. Mueck, E. Calvanese Strinati, E. Dutkiewicz “Narrowband
IoT service provision to 5G User Equipment via a satellite component”
IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps), 2017.