THE AGE OF AUTONOMY
In April, a small aluminum boat will leave Plymouth, England, sailing west toward the New World. Its name is Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) and it may succeed in having at least as significant an impact on mankind as its namesake did 400 years ago, but by entirely different means. Whereas the first Mayflower’s voyage of discovery brought colonists across the Atlantic, forever changing the landscape and populace of a continent, this one sails unmanned, making its own navigating decisions and conducting research autonomously. When MAS crosses the Atlantic, it will make history as one of the most comprehensive applications of artificial intelligence (AI) yet, offering scientists a less expensive way to gather information, and altering the definition of “captain” in the process.
MAS is a 49ft solar-powered trimaran, built by Aluship in Gdańsk, Poland, and outfitted in Plymouth under the direction of ProMare, a non-profit marine research and exploration corporation founded in 2001. An amalgamation of the latest technology and staggering algorithms with two years of intensive machine learning puts the necessary capabilities for truly autonomous ship operation in one package. Make no mistake: this is no robot or drone. The MAS400 project’s mission is to cruise non-stop to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the most efficient and safest way possible without human interaction. It has six cameras, radar, sonar, AIS, GPS navigation programs and weather monitoring feeding 15 onboard edge computers (in which the data is processed by the device itself, rather than being transmitted to a data center). Its captain,
