Implementation of Teleoperation in the Marine Sector: Investigating the requirements for a teleoperated vessel

Abstract

The trend towards autonomy is rapidly advancing across all mobility sectors and marine mobility is no exception. While the sector has seen significant improvements in the last couple of years there is still progress to be made before autonomous vessels can be widely adopted. Nevertheless, many advantages of autonomous vessels can already be realized through teleoperation. In complex situations like navigating in and out of ports, operators can take control, while straightforward tasks such as traversing open waters with minimal traffic can be managed by the vessel itself, even with low levels of automation, reducing or removing the time the operator needs to spend performing simple driving tasks. While teleoperation as a concept has been around for some time research on what is needed for a marine teleoperation system is scarce. This paper aims to fill the gap by investigating the requirements for a general marine teleoperation implementation. Key areas of focus include the information the operator needs from the vessel, the control functionalities necessary for effective manoeuvring, methods for transmitting information between the vessel and operator, and the bandwidth and latency requirements for the communication link. The problem was treated like a requirement analysis commonly used in software with a use case scenario being the main input in finding needs. This was supplemented by literature reviews and some discussions with former industry professionals. The study indicates that the current level of automation in vessels is so advanced that, with the addition of functionalities such as a camera cluster and a connection unit, a functioning teleoperation system could be realized in the near future.