A new report commissioned by the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) highlights the challenges posed by the unmanned autonomous seas foraging in the sea. Patrick Kingsland finds out more on this from Erik Tvedt, a special adviser at the DMA, says a report in the ship technology.
- Unmanned autonomous vessels are pose a serious problem for the regulating authorities.
- The existing laws can’t regulate them as they are meant for manned ships.
- Artificial Intelligence might serve the purpose, says Erik Tvedt of DMA.
- IMO is trying to set an international standard to regulate unmanned vessels.
For the past four decades, Erik Tvedt, naval architect at the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA), has participated in conversations and projects about automation that involve what he describes as the same “theories, ideas, and thought processes”.
As digitalisation and automation techniques improved, these ideas gained momentum and became a viable business option in the maritime industry. “The computer power available today per pound or dollar is so much higher than what we had before,” says Tvedt. “The software tools are also cheaper and easier to use and we now have new sensor technology, night vision systems, satellite communication, broadband communication, the list goes on.”
Recent Developments
Last year, Rolls-Royce and global towage operator Svitzer successfully demonstrated the world’s first remotely operated commercial vessel in Copenhagen harbour. A few months earlier, the world’s first fully-autonomous, fully electric containership – called Yara Birkeland – launched in Norway.
Although these autonomous vessels are expected to reduce the overall number of collisions at sea (most of which are caused by human error) the technology does create a number of important legal and regulatory challenges. As most of the international and national codes were written keeping in the manned ships hence they are unsuitable for this newly developed unmanned vessels. It’s a race to replace this 200-year-old system which needs to be done faster than it’s expected.
Consensus for regulating autonomy
According to Tvedt, the first challenge lies in defining the exact needs of autonomous regulation. While many people think of autonomous vessels as ships without crews, levels of autonomy can vary from full automation and remote monitoring to simple decision support and automatic course steering.
A commercial ship making a voyage from one port to another, for example, may transition between several levels of automation in a relatively short amount of time. “A ship may leave a port as a manual, traditional ship and then go into remote control,” says Tvedt. “After that, it may go into total autonomous mode at night.” As things stand, Tvedt adds, the industry is struggling to agree upon an appropriate definition that includes all of these variations.
“When people say autonomous ships, everybody has their own definition,” says Tvedt. “Put 30 guys in a room and you will have 50 different versions, none of which are necessarily right or wrong. The problem is that we cannot regulate something if we don’t agree what we are regulating.”
Adapting to the existing laws
The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), for example, state that ships must be controlled by human beings and navigated according to a “seamanlike” assessment of specific situations. So the next hurdle is in adapting to the existing laws and making them viable for this new kind of vessels.
Remote controlled ships won’t be much affected as the regulations determines who is controlling the vessel rather than where they are doing it from, says a recent report byRambøll and CORE Law firm.
But the fully autonomous vessels using pre-programmed algorithms rather than “seamanlike” assessments, COLREGs could prove challenging. This is particularly true in situations where autonomous ships are operating alongside non-autonomous ships and may react to events in completely different ways.
Solution
Chartering an entirely new regulation that takes into account decisions made on the basis of pre-programmed choices offers the way out. Forging international guidelines to determine which decisions should be left to automated systems and which to humans are other viable actions.
Another challenge is presented by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), part of which requires all ships to be “in charge of a master and officers who possess appropriate qualifications” – not something an artificial intelligence system on a fully automated ship will be able to fulfil.
“Regulators will need to consider how applicable existing laws are to this new generation of vessels.”
Utility of Artificial Intelligence
“Artificial intelligence may be able to do the job but how do we verify that?” says Tvedt. “If we have got a human being they have a career path, training, examinations. They go to sea to learn and then they are evaluated. It takes several years before you are allowed to be captain of a big container ship.”
The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) and the International Convention on Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Co-operation (OPRC) also requires that ships have special preparedness plans in place in the event of a pollution emergency.
According to the DMA report, “these preparedness plans presuppose the presence of a crew on board vessels”. Similarly, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) places a major emphasis on the role that crews play in the event of a fire emergency. In both cases, new regulations are likely to be needed.
The DMA report further recommends that remote operators are subjected to the same legal, navigational obligations as traditional masters. To the obligation that seafarers assist persons in distress at sea, the authors recommend clarifying UNCLOS and SOLAS provisions that state ships are only compelled to act if they are “in a position to be able to provide assistance”.
International Standards by IMO
How close regulators are to achieving that unified code depends, says Tvedt, on your definition of automation.
“If you are thinking of a totally autonomous, fully unmanned ship going from one container terminal to another, across the world, then we are far off,” he says. “But if you picture an autonomous ship as a small research vessel, doing some work in the North Atlantic, then we are already there – it is fully within today’s regulations. Once we agree what we are talking about and get our definitions right, we will be two thirds of the way there.”
So, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has to set some international standards to govern these autonomous ships. Without such an unified code, ports would simply prevent ships from doing business.
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Source: Ship Technology
