Autonomous and remotely-operated ships

DNV has two dedicated teams focused only on autonomy and remote operation (autoremote) of vessels. On the practical and approval side, a multi-disciplinary approval team focuses in achieving equivalent safety when compared to conventional vessels. On the theoretical and exploratory side, the research team focuses on autoremote technologies, their applications and methods to verify their safe implementation.

Both approval and research teams attend and speak at the most important international autonomous ships conferences and gatherings, maintaining the teams’ knowledge-base always up to date with the latest technological and operational advancements in the field. In addition to that, autoremote approval team members also participate in IMO MASS discussions for the development of the MASS code as flag advisory. This participation allows the team to have up-to date information of current and future regulation, which is also applied in the autoremote approval processes. 

The autoremote approval team published the first autonomous and remotely operated ships guideline in 2018 and since then it has built experience in many different projects worldwide. The team verified different autoremote operational concepts, ranging from passenger ferries, to survey vessels, USVs and cargo vessels, from small 7m crafts up to 78m vessels, both crewed and uncrewed. All this knowledge and experience, combined with 160 years shipping expertise makes DNV autonomy team the best choice to approve and follow-up autoremote vessels. 

Since the publication of the first version of DNV-CG-0264, DNV has been involved in a wide range of autoremote ships projects. The autonomy teamWe had projects with vessels of many types, different operations and various autonomy goals. Check out some of our latest achievements in the news section.