Communication in Encounter Situations of Autonomous and Non-autonomous Ships

Research on autonomous ships is in progress in many centres around the world. It is expected that soon these ships will gradually start entering service. More and more encounters at sea will involve manned vessels, including leisure boats and yachts, and autonomous ships. In such cases communication is carried out on the manned vessel by a navigator, and on the autonomous vessel an information system acts a virtual navigator. Part of the present research has focused on an analysis of the communication between human navigators during ship encounters. Based on this, the concept of a virtual navigator has been developed using methods and tools of artificial intelligence. The authors propose decision-making algorithms for communication in collision situations, where negotiations aimed at mutual agreement of appropriate manoeuvres are taken into account. Simulated encounters of an autonomous and non-autonomous ship for selected scenarios allowed us to assess whether the executed communication processes proceeded correctly. A system of this type can enable communication between a navigator and an autonomous ship using natural language.