Improving safety of interactions between conventional and autonomous ships

Automatic controllers work best when the system they control can be sufficiently well modelled. This is a problem for control of autonomous ships in mixed traffic situations where the autonomous ship interacts with conventional ships, as the crew on other ships can and will exert unexpected behaviour that cannot be easily modelled. This paper analyses the problem of information acquisition, situational assessment and how to predict other ship's actions for autonomous ships that need to interact with conventional ships. We identify causes for the interaction problem and classify these into a decision making model. We also identify possible measures to overcome the problems and based on an impact analysis where technical, procedural and regulatory aspects are considered, we discuss and propose some possible ways to reduce or solve this problem. The conclusion is that the most likely and effective short-term solution is to assist the autonomous ships with human operators and the best longer-term solution may be to improve the information exchange between the ships, complemented with changes in COLREGs.