Robot boat to make transatlantic journey from UK to US

Nearly four hundred years since the ship Mayflower crossed the Atlantic Ocean with 102 passengers, a ship bearing the same name will make the same voyage to Plymouth Rock in the United States from Plymouth, England with no humans on board. How? Autonomous sailing.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence and solar energy, Mayflower Autonomous Ship, a collaborative project between Promare, a marine research organisation and IBM will retrace the historic voyage on September 16. It will become the on the first full-sized, fully autonomous vessels to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

This mission is expected to pave the way for the development of commercial autonomous ships and boats to help transform the future of marine research.

A new ‘AI Captain’ will enable the Mayflower autonomous ship to navigate itself across the Atlantic. AI Captain uses cameras, AI and edge computing systems to navigate around ships, buoys and other hazards that it is expected to face on its journey.

The ship will trace the route of the original 1620 Mayflower to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the famous voyage.

“You have a larger area to operate, and there’s a lot less opportunity to collide with other vehicles or pedestrians,” Neil Tinmouth, chief operating officer of Sea-Kit tells Wall Street Journal. This makes autonomy easier to implement on the sea than on land.

The mayflower is set to handle storms. It will use data from The Weather Company to predict weather phenomena at sea as the weather is a huge variable while sailing.