In the past year, we've gotten used to remote work. We meet on Teams, share files on OneDrive, and brainstorm on Miro. Chatter that once happened around the coffee machine now takes place on Discord and Slack while we sit at home in the sonic bubble of our headphones. For students and researchers, this transition has been more or less straightforward. But how might we envision the remote work for others?

How might we envision the 'home office,' for example, for ferry Captains?

Is this the 'home office' for the Captain of an autonomous ferry? (Credit: Edvard Liodden)

At NTNU, we are leading the charge towards autonomous ferries. In just the past two years, milliAmpere has been breaking waves in sensor fusion and Autoferry Gemini has caused a splash in the field of digital twins. As we speak, some of the brightest students and researchers in the country are connecting the hardware that will drive the autonomy system in the milliAmpereII: the full scale prototype borne out of the Autoferry project.

The Autoferry Gemini simulator will let designers understand what information a Captain needs to remotely operate an autonomous ferry (Credit: Thomas Skarshaug)

Meanwhile, in the face of this rapid development, the question has become more pressing: does an autonomous ferry need a Captain?

The Autoferry project has long predicted that the Captain will be just as important as with manually controlled ships - the job will just look a bit different. Now, the Department of Design is sharing their vision of what the future of marine operations looks like. For years now, Design has been developing competence in this area, positioning new technologies in the larger context of humans and organization. Now they are turning vision into reality at the new Shore Control Lab.

Research Assistant Thomas Kaland helping to construct the new Shore Control Lab at Nyhavna (Photo: Erik Veitch)

In the coming months, the new Design-led Shore Control Lab will be ready at the Nyhavna campus in Trondheim. One of the first questions that will be researched by the team behind the Shore Control Lab is Can video games be used to research human-machine interaction of autonomous vessels?  (Hint: they think the answer is 'yes.') Among the efforts in place is using Unity to prototype the shore control centre of the future, building off the progress made in the open source Autoferry Gemini simulator.

The mission of the lab is simple: to 'keep humans in the loop.' The question of how to keep humans in the loop in face of challenging remote operations and autonomous systems remains, for the time being, unanswered.

Are you a student who wants to get involved? Or just looking for more info? You can get in touch through the Shore Control Lab website.