The Concept of Autonomy, Operation of Autonomous Vessels and the IMO's Degrees of Autonomy

Contemporary developments indicate that the advent of autonomous vessels in shipping operations is near. Considering the slow progress in drafting regulations specifically applicable to these new types of vessels, it appears highly likely that they will be subject to the application of the existing regulations for quite sometime. Consequently, the past decade has seen countless studies concentrating on reviewing the applicability of the existing regulations to autonomous vessels. Arguably, the most noteworthy of these studies is the IMO's scoping exercise and its degrees of autonomy designed for this inquiry have been rather influential in shaping the understanding of the subject, which led many similar studies centring their analysis on these four specific categories. However, the categorisation adopted by the IMO is open to criticism. Indeed, not only are the four degrees of autonomy inconsistent with the technical concepts widely used in autonomous vessel design but they are also unsuitable for evaluating the application of the existing legal rules to autonomous vessels as they are of a highly static character. The latter is especially problematic as all prevailing technical designs for realising autonomous vessels expect the ship rotating freely between different degrees of autonomy. This means that, despite not being a fully autonomous vessel, in the course of a single voyage the vessel might be operated at times without any human intervention in higher degrees of autonomy as well as being manually controlled by the crew or the remote control centre personnel when the need arises. In view of such a dynamic mode of operation, it is submitted that the usefulness of the static categories is markedly limited in analysing the applicability of the current regulations to autonomous vessels and regard must be had for certain parameters to be determined in light of the central differences between the conventional vessels and the autonomous vessel prototypes currently being tested for operation.