CAPTAINED BY AI — MAYFLOWER AUTONOMOUS SHIP
Brett Phaneuf, Founder of Promare, has been working to promote marine exploration throughout the world with a vision to combine edge-cutting technologies for enhancing maritime capabilities.
Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS), a fully autonomous boat powered by Artificial Intelligence, is a highly innovative project led by IBM and Promare and will serve as a remarkable transformation in the world of oceanography.
What makes it different?
Most of the regular ships require an environment that is safe and suitable for a human being.
The new generation, Mayflower has eliminated this restriction by being fully autonomous!
This advantage helped with optimizing the ship as a machine, reduces its size, thus, making it cost-effective as well.
Artificial Intelligence is the technology involved, serving as the Captain of this ship, gives MAS the ability to sense, think and make decisions at sea with no human captain or onboard crew.
How is the Mayflower Autonomous Ship designed?
With more than 30 sensors onboard, it has a shape of a trimaran having a central hull and two outrigger wings. MAS has 6 AI cameras onboard and an Octopus!
This Octopus is actually a chatbot, called Artie which is featured on the portal, MAS400, created to display real-time updates.
As said in the Innovation Leaders Summit — MIT Technology Review:
‘It is designed in a way to discover, capture, analyze, automate, and govern by rules-based business decisions that leverage 5G and satellite networks to push those outputs to the Edge, enabling information-sharing and collaboration in the most challenging environment on earth.’
What makes it useful?
The ocean influences weather and climate by storing solar radiation, distributing heat and moisture around the globe, and driving weather systems.
- MAS will collect oceanographic data and perform study and research around critical issues such as global warming, ocean plastic pollution, sea level height & wave patterns, and marine mammal conservation.
- Additionally, Ocean-related industries such as shipping, oil & gas, telecommunications, security & defense, fishing & aquaculture will be able to transform oceanography like never before with the help of Mayflower.
