A Survey of Technologies for Unmanned Merchant Ships

Unmanned merchant ships are ships that carry goods and engage in commercial activities without manual operations on board. In contrast to traditional merchant ships, unmanned merchant ships have great advantages in economy, society, and safety. However, we observe that commercial applications of unmanned ships are still at an exploratory stage. We believe that unmanned merchant ships will be widely adopted and popular in the near future. There is a need to have a good survey of current technologies, foundation, and obstacles of implementation of future unmanned merchant ships. Such a survey is beneficial to ship builders, researchers, owners, and students. Therefore, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of ship structure and technology, navigation, automation, algorithms, communication, Internet of Things (IOT), etc. We introduce traditional ships and analyze the role of crew and navigation operations on board. We summarize classifications, benefits, and core technologies of unmanned merchant ships. We review architecture, communication standards, security, essential technologies of IOT for unmanned merchant ships. Moreover, we introduce intelligent awareness, data fusion, applications, and E-navigation for unmanned merchant ships. We also present several future research directions at the end.