To make autonomous, affordable ships feasible in the real world, they must be capable of safely navigating without fully relying on GPS, high-resolution 3D maps, or high-performance navigation sensors. We suggest a method for estimating the position using affordable navigation sensors (compass and speed log or inertial navigation sensor), sensors used for perception of the environment (cameras, echo sounder, magnetometer), and publicly available maps (sea charts and magnetic intensity anomalies maps). A real-world field trial has shown that the proposed fusion mechanism provides accurate and robust navigation, applicable for affordable autonomous ships.

We compared three different Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) that we have designed and implemented to enable human supervision of an unmanned ship. Our findings indicate that a 3D GUI presented either on a screen or in a Virtual Reality (VR) setting provides several objective and subjective benefits compared to a Baseline GUI representing traditional tools.