The Challenges of Building Trust in Autonomous Navigation Systems: A Perspective on the Tester

This study seeks to enhance understanding of the tester's role in building trust in autonomous maritime systems. As ongoing maritime developments point towards the implementation of advanced navigation systems with the potential to enable autonomous- and remotely operated ships, the industry aims to enhance safety, efficiency and reduce its environmental footprint. However, assessing the reliability and robustness of intelligent and complex systems, envisioned to operate in complex and dynamic environments, poses significant challenges towards existing regulatory frameworks and assessment practices. Hence, to build trust in autonomous systems and ensure that safety requirements are met, comprehensive and systematic testing is necessary. In this context, automated testing through simulation is an important method. This approach involves automatically and iteratively probing the system under test with a range of scenarios. However, considering the potential size of the scenario space, an automatic approach to evaluating system outputs is needed. Still, whilst automatic evaluation can greatly improve the efficiency and coverage of the test process, human testers provide significant added value through their domain expertise, knowledge, and experience. This includes evaluating the overall results of the automatic process, performing spot-checks on individual cases, and investigating specific results. Together, the aggregate of these evaluations supports the tester in building confidence in the system's test results, and trust in the system's overall performance. Considering the novelty of autonomous navigation systems, this paper reviews relevant regulations, challenges related to requiring safety equivalence, and the need for testing. Furthermore, this paper explores the anticipated role-change of human testers and reflects on how to support them in their new tasks.

Keywords: Autonomy, Autonomous navigation, Collision avoidance, Testing, Human tester, Human-machine.