ABSTRACT
Chapter 13 takes a brief look at areas and topics included in published research about autonomous ships during the period of the HUMANE project, 2018 to July 2022. The method used for finding research papers has been a search engine query using the search string “autonomous ships”. These findings were augmented with “snowball sampling”, an unstructured non-probability sampling technique where references in, or references to, existing articles were used. Altogether 111 articles were reviewed.
The review looked at trends regarding the topic of research, publishing year, and nationality of the contributing institutions. A brief review of the content was also made. The research question was where and when is what kind of autonomous ship research made and by whom.
Not surprisingly, the finding was that the number of papers published on the topic has greatly increased during the period (albeit the Covid-19 pandemic is clearly visible). It is also no surprise that technical papers constitute the majority and Human Factors papers a minority. More surprising was the finding that Norway and China came side by side as the main contributors to published research for the period in question.
