Countermeasures for legal issues to realize autonomous shipping

Abstract

In recent years, engineering technology has become essential for our daily life. We cannot live without civil engineering or information technology even for one day. At the same time, as utilizing technologies sometimes infringe human rights, many laws and regulations exist in our society. In spite of importance to collaborate with legal experts for engineer to realize implementation of their new technologies into society, and a lot of efforts of the Professional Committee of Law and Technology in the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, it has not been understood in Japan for a long time. Many issues have been discussed relating to the growing concern about autonomous vehicles, but it seems insufficient from the view of legal and engineering collaboration. In this paper, a case study is introduced that is an example of legal engineering showing countermeasures for legal issues to realize autonomous shipping performed by Robotics Laboratory in Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. Furthermore, knowledge obtained by this case study is proposed as legal engineering which presents how engineers may identify legal issues and perform risk assessment of their developing technologies. By communicating with legal experts, engineers might be able to perform technology development with legal risk mitigation and take a role for rulemaking especially in the field of soft-law.