Over 400 years ago, the Mayflower with 102 English settlers sailed from Plymouth in Britain to America. The crossing took two months. A robotic boat without a crew and controlled by artificial intelligence wanted to repeat the historic voyage in just three weeks. The ship has already crossed the Atlantic, but it docked in Canada on Sunday instead of in America.
The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) has covered a distance of 4,400 kilometers from Plymouth, UK, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The destination was actually a little further away: Massachusetts in the United States. But due to problems at sea, the ship was diverted to Canada. He will probably stay there for a week or two.
MAS is a 15-meter solar-powered trimaran. The vehicle can reach speeds of up to 20 km/h and is controlled by artificial intelligence from IBM based on information from six cameras and 50 sensors. According to the project leaders, the ship was built to show how technology has evolved over the centuries since the Pilgrim Fathers, religious dissidents, traveled to the New World in 1620.
The AI ship departed from the UK on April 29 and will take three weeks to complete the voyage. But technical problems have hampered this initial goal. At the end of May it was decided to transfer MAS to Halifax. However, IBM’s technology worked as expected, according to project manager Brett Vanoff, and it is still scheduled to sail to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and then head to Washington, DC.
The original Mayflower was a 30-meter-long, three-masted wooden ship with canvas sails. The maximum speed was 6 km / h. In 1602, with a crew of about 30 and 102 Pilgrims on board, the ship sailed from Plymouth, in the United Kingdom, to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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