Perspective-Taking in Anticipatory Maritime Navigation - Implications for Developing Autonomous Ships

We consider the development of autonomous ships and programming-based navigation by exploring and describing communicative and predictive elements in navigational risk-minimization. Maritime pilots (n=6) and other professional mariners (n=2) were interviewed and observed actualizing navigational tasks at a ship simulator. The results suggest that expert navigators envision the possible capabilities, situational awareness, tasks, manoeuvrability and predictability. Overall, navigation involves perspective-taking, which is a basic feature of social cognition. In discussing design implications, we propose that similar features could be implemented to autonomous ship navigation