The original Mayflower, the famous one, left Plymouth, England, on Sept. 16, 1620, and made landfall in the New World, near where Provincetown is today on Cape Cod, 66 days later. It was about 90 feet long, weighed 180 tons, and carried a crew of about 30 and 102 Pilgrims as passengers (including five who died along the way).
Next September, on the 400th anniversary of the original voyage, another Mayflower will leave Plymouth and retrace the 3,220-mile trip. It will be about 164 feet long, weigh 5 tons, and it won’t have any crew or passengers on board at all. The new Mayflower will be totally autonomous, controlled by IBM’s Artificial Intelligence technology, and it is expected to make landfall in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in just 12 days.
The new Mayflower Autonomous Ship will be built in Poland by ProMare, a nonprofit marine research organization, and it promises to be among the first unmanned ships ever to cross the Atlantic. The idea is to demonstrate the advances in autonomous seafaring technology and promote marine research and exploration.
IBM will provide tech support for the ship’s navigation and research, using its Power AI vision technology, with radar, lidar and optical cameras linked to Power Systems servers to keep the ship on course and avoid obstacles. It will have solar panels and diesel and wind turbines to provide power.
Three research pods on board will allow scientists at the University of Plymouth in England to run experiments in maritime cybersecurity, sea mammal monitoring, and the challenges of ocean-borne microplastics during the trip.
ProMare and IBM hope that trip will open the doors for other research on autonomous ships in areas of the world that are not hospitable to humans. Some of those trips “can be really long and boring and expensive,” Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM’s chief technology officer for UK/Ireland, told Fox News. “This vessel can just plow up and down taking readings and really advancing marine research.” Read more:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ibm-mayflower-ai-atlantic-ocean
