Last week the Autonomous Ship Technology Symposium was held for the first time in Amsterdam. During this three day event, a variety of speakers from industry and academia presented their activities and achievements towards the realization of autonomous vessels in the near future. Openers of the conference have been the two keynotes held by Oskar Levander about Rolls-Royce vision towards autonomous vessels as well as Hans-Christoph Burmeister from Fraunhofer CML, who introduced the audience to the results of the MUNIN project and its views on further promising application areas of maritime autonomous technology. This was then continued by a fruitful plenum discussion including active participation by the ship owner and operator industry.
As one of the originating projects in this area, MUNIN was contributing to the further course of the symposium with three presentations covering cost-benefit aspects, design and navigation challenges, maintenance issues as well as shore support principles.