A Mayflower to advance the promise of AI and automation
May 10, 2021 Maritime Safety News
The maritime research vessel Mayflower Autonomous Ship is a first-of its-kind autonomous ship — and IBM technology played a central role in bringing it to life. On its inaugural journey, the ship will commemorate the original Mayflower by following its transatlantic route. But this modern Mayflower will gather critical ocean data on the impact of climate change and pollution so that marine researchers can better understand and protect our oceans — now and into the future.
IBM engineered the crewless ship with three layers of technology: sensory inputs, real-time machine learning and analytics, and a decision engine. IBM experts used petabytes of data to train machine learning models and wrote rules-based decisioning for the decision engine, enabling the ship to react to an often-treacherous ocean environment — with zero human intervention. It adheres to maritime law while making crucial split-second decisions. It reroutes itself around harsh weather environments. It collects and analyzes massive amounts of ocean data. And it does it all 24/7.
By extending the ship’s groundbreaking intelligent automation, operational decision-making, edge computing and AI-powered remote monitoring technologies across industries, we can pave the way for the next generation of innovation, efficiency, safety and cost-savings in your business.
Source: ibm