Russian Maritime Authorities approved the first advanced training programs for the crews of maritime autonomous ships. The programs enrich the competencies of the crew members with the skills to operate both crewed  and crewless MASS.

The success of autonomous shipping achieved within the national experiment of MASS use in Russia has highlighted the explicit commercial demand for personnel with skills to manage autonomous vessels. Thus, the Russian University of Transport in cooperation with Admiral Ushakov Maritime University and Admiral Makarov University of Maritime and Inland Shipping have developed several advanced training programs for autonomous ship crews.

By now, eight programs for crew members and two programs for supporting service specialists are approved. The programs for the crew members include:

∙             A master and a chief mate of a semi-autonomous MASS and a master of fully autonomous MASS (master of MASS Remote Control Center);

∙             Officers in charge of the navigation watch and engineering watch for a semi-autonomous MASS;

∙             A management-level engineer and an electrical engineer for a semi-autonomous MASS; and

∙             A remote crew engineer officer.

The programs for supporting service specialists are designed for VTS and GMDSS Operators and aim to enhance understanding of autonomous and semi-autonomous ship operations.

As an example, advanced training for a master of MASS Remote Control Center for fully autonomous ships capable to navigate without a crew on board under continuous supervision over the ship and control over her movement by a remote crew outside the ship, or without any supervision, include following competencies:

∙             International maritime conventions and recommendations, national legislation on autonomous navigation;

∙             Artificial intelligence, machine learning, human-machine interaction;

∙             Identification of the state of an autonomous ship, her monitoring, control, and overall management;

∙             Interaction with the VTS, actions in case of accidents in operations;

∙             Implementation and management of cyber security actions.

Practical training is required by each of the programs and takes up to 60% of all training time at some programs. Practical training is carried out at a dedicated simulator platform for autonomous navigation designed in 2020-2022 by Sitronics under MARINET project “Virtual platform for unmanned shipping modeling”. For training purposes, the simulator platform safely tests maritime autonomous ships, scales, forecasts the situations, and predicts the movements of other objects around.

The training platform itself is a complex of an enhanced visualization system, a navigation bridge with a set of navigation instruments, indicators, and means of control that may be composed to imitate several ship bridges, and other additional components.