Pairing Digital Twins with Maritime Autonomy

Digital twins paired with maritime autonomy can significantly improve an operator's confidence in autonomous unmanned systems. A digital twin should be developed with operational use cases and systems in mind and by focusing on core modules of the system that provide the biggest impact for the system to understand operator's intent. This paper provides a survey of maritime autonomy standards and implementations, communication standards and implementations and design considerations for trying to pair digital twins with maritime autonomy for use in unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).