Hybrid Navigation Acceptability and Safety
Benoit Clement, Marie Dubromel, Paulo E. Santos, Karl Sammut, Michelle Oppert, Feras Dayoub
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of achieving COLREGs-compliant autonomy for autonomous surface vessels operating in mixed human and autonomous traffic under varying conditions. It proposes a hybrid AI framework with four modules: Autonomous Situation Awareness for perception, Readability of Human Rules to encode human-like COLREG semantics via SUMO ontology, Path Planning and Control for multi-constraint trajectory optimization, and Human Acceptability to address adoption, adaptation, and trust. Long-term trajectory prediction and multi-ship simulations, grounded in AIS data, aim to produce COLREG-compliant and socially acceptable vessel behaviours, while a lightweight simulator enables training and evaluation of acceptability and safety. The work highlights the role of human factors, regulatory considerations, and cybersecurity in practical deployment, and demonstrates an initial simulation-based validation strategy to improve safety and adoption of autonomous maritime navigation.
Abstract
Autonomous vessels have emerged as a prominent and accepted solution, particularly in the naval defence sector. However, achieving full autonomy for marine vessels demands the development of robust and reliable control and guidance systems that can handle various encounters with manned and unmanned vessels while operating effectively under diverse weather and sea conditions. A significant challenge in this pursuit is ensuring the autonomous vessels' compliance with the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs). These regulations present a formidable hurdle for the human-level understanding by autonomous systems as they were originally designed from common navigation practices created since the mid-19th century. Their ambiguous language assumes experienced sailors' interpretation and execution, and therefore demands a high-level (cognitive) understanding of language and agent intentions. These capabilities surpass the current state-of-the-art in intelligent systems. This position paper highlights the critical requirements for a trustworthy control and guidance system, exploring the complexity of adapting COLREGs for safe vessel-on-vessel encounters considering autonomous maritime technology competing and/or cooperating with manned vessels.