Abstract
In recent decades, the rapid growth of intelligent sensors and technology has made the idea of autonomous ships a reality. It is anticipated that autonomous ships will become operational shortly. Researchers have already started working on developing supportive infrastructure for autonomous ship operations. The main goal of these supportive infrastructures, so-called onshore operation centers (OOC), is to provide all necessary supportive functions remotely to these autonomous ships based on their level of autonomy. Human operators can provide the support needed through shore-based OOC to operate autonomous ships safely. Most of the research focuses on the technology development aspect, and there is less effort in training these future OOC operators to operate these ships. The human element still exists in different forms, even in autonomous ship operations. It is quite challenging to identify the training needs and provide the required facilities to train future OOC human operators. Due to the high cost involved, such infrastructure is lacking in conducting remote ship operations experiments and training these OOC operators. To handle these problems, the current study proposed a custom virtual reality (VR) simulator-based platform to conduct experiments and train future OOC operators. This way, the cost of building training facilities and time can be reduced significantly. A case study is presented to check the proposed system functionality and identify challenges in such VR-based training exercises.