ABSTRACT
On any scale, the years 2020 and 2021 were highly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the HUMANE project included. Planned physical events, like the HUMANE workshops which were conducted earlier in the project, were cancelled and the overall project momentum was to some degree lost. Among other things, this meant that earlier HUMANE project results were at an increased risk of going stale or becoming out of tune with the ongoing autonomous shipping agenda, which was still developing, virus or no virus. In other words, we saw the risk of the main HUMANE project deliverables conceivably going out of fashion before even being published. For this reason, we decided to do a reality check on our data, trying to improve or even ensure currency and synchronization to the general thinking in the maritime industry. The present chapter reports on these undertakings, to a large extent sharing the raw data with the reader to provide transparency and richness, and to support the reader in forming her or his own opinion; indeed, it has been our intent to refrain from interpretation in this chapter – rather, we have limited our scope of work to collect opinions and knowledge from persons with insights, and even influence, on the maritime autonomous shipping agenda, and by relating these data to each other, to present a themed picture of present thinking.
