[1][2] As of 2019, several autonomous cargo ship projects were in development, a prominent one being the construction of the MV Yara Birkeland, which was initially scheduled to enter trials in 2019 and operations in 2020.
[5] France reported on trials with "VN REBEL",[6] the 80-meter-long merchant ship based in the Toulon harbour, which was remotely controlled from the Polytechnic School in the Paris region.
China reported on trials conducted with the ship Jin Dou Yun 0 Hao,[7] the 12.9-m vessel operated by automatic navigation technology and remote control, and powered from an electrical plant.
"[10][11] Regulatory, safety, legal and security challenges are viewed as the largest obstacles in making autonomous cargo ships a reality.
Personnel with traditional maritime, engineering, and ICT training will be present in order to deal with sudden events such as a communications breakdown, fire, or a search and rescue operation.
Fully autonomous operations would allow the ship to sail without any human interference, gathering information and data from its surroundings and enacting a decision based on it.
It can also send and receive navigational and positional data from other autonomous ships similar to airborne collision avoidance system, allowing it to take safe action if needed.
The principle suggests that functions prescribed for onboard crew by current maritime regulation to be completely carried out automatically and under remote control.
The data would then be processed by artificial intelligence systems either on board the vessel itself or at an onshore location, proposing an optimal route and decision pattern.
Autonomous ships may however increase onshore costs in the form of large upfront investments and upkeep of control and operations centers, sensors, data servers and communication assets such as high-bandwidth satellites.
Increasing redundancy is seen as the solution, either by having two engine systems or by using different propulsion methods that contain fewer moving parts such as electricity on MV Yara Birkeland.
Rule 5 in the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREG) requires there to be a lookout present in order to avoid collisions and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) require ships to be able to assist in search and rescue operations, such as picking up survivors in case of a shipwreck.
[27] Due to the increased reliance on information and communications technology in semi- and fully autonomous ships, cyber security becomes an even more serious issue that companies would need to address.
To achieve more efficient use of storage and communication capacity, smart pre-processing and compression schemes are needed in order to reduce the chances of "data swamping.
[33] The lack of proper cyber security training makes the vessel vulnerable to the plugging in of personal devices, jamming of safety-critical networks, spear-phishing, and system engineering.
[33] Simple cyber hygiene education regarding the difference between onboard networks for operational use and recreational can have considerable influence on the security of autonomous ships.