More than 400 years ago, the ship Mayflower sailed with 102 English settlers from British Plymouth to America. The crossing took two months. A robot boat without a crew and controlled by artificial intelligence wanted to repeat the historic trip in just three weeks. The ship did indeed cross the Atlantic, but docked in Canada on Sunday instead of America.
The so-called Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) covered 4,400 km from Plymouth in the United Kingdom to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The destination was actually a little further: Massachusetts in the US. But due to problems at sea, the ship was diverted to Canada. It will probably stay there for a week or two.
The MAS is a 15 meter trimaran powered by solar energy. The craft can reach speeds of up to 20 km/h and is controlled via 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 much technology has evolved in the centuries since the Pilgrim Fathers, religious dissenters, traveled to the New World in 1620.
The AI ship departed from the United Kingdom on April 29 and would take three weeks to complete the trip. But technical problems got in the way of that initial goal. At the end of May it was decided to divert the MAS to Halifax. Still, IBM’s technology worked as expected, according to project director Brett Phaneuf, and is still scheduled to sail to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and then set course for Washington DC.
The original Mayflower was a 30m wooden three-masted ship with canvas sails. The top speed was 6 km/h. The ship sailed in 1602 with a crew of about 30 and with 102 Pilgrim Fathers aboard Plymouth in the United Kingdom to Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
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