IBM joins Mayflower Autonomous Ship project

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IBM has joined an international effort to build an unmanned, fully autonomous transatlantic research vessel that is set to launch on the fourth centenary of the original Mayflower voyage.

Marine research organisation ProMare is leading the development of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS), which will use IBM’s AI, servers, cloud and edge computing technologies to navigate autonomously and avoid ocean hazards as she sails from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts in September 2020. If successful, it will be one of the first self-navigating, full-sized vessels to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

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"Putting a research ship to sea can cost tens of thousands of dollars or pounds a day and is limited by how much time people can spend onboard – a prohibitive factor for many of today's marine scientific missions," said Brett Phaneuf, a founding board member of ProMare and co-director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project. "With this project, we are pioneering a cost-effective and flexible platform for gathering data that will help safeguard the health of the ocean and the industries it supports."

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