High-Tech Autonomous UK-US Ship Launched on 400th Mayflower Anniversary
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High-tech UK-US ship launched on 400th Mayflower anniversary:
With a splash of Plymouth gin, the U.S. ambassador to Britain officially launched a ship named Mayflower on Wednesday, 400 years to the day after a wooden vessel with that name sailed from an English port and changed the history of two continents.
Unlike the merchant ship that carried a group of European Puritan settlers to a new life across the Atlantic Ocean in 1620, the Mayflower christened by U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood Johnson has no crew or passengers. It will cross the sea powered by sun and wind, and steered by artificial intelligence.
Johnson said the high-tech ship, developed jointly by U.K.-based marine research organization ProMare and U.S. tech giant IBM, showed that "the pioneering spirit of the Mayflower really lives on" in the trans-Atlantic partnership.
[...] The Mayflower Autonomous Ship - its creators decided against a snappier name - is intended to be the first in a new generation of crewless high-tech vessels that can explore parts of oceans too difficult or dangerous for people to reach.
[...] The 50-foot (15-meter) trimaran will undertake six months of sea trials and short trips before setting out on its trans-Atlantic trip to measure ocean health: assessing the impact of climate change, measuring micro-plastic pollution and studying populations of whales and dolphins.
Along the way, its AI captain will have to make complex decisions in response to wind, waves, vessels and unknown surprises.
"We're quietly confident we're going to make it," Stanford-Clark said. "Ultimately, the sea will decide."
Related:
Groundbreaking Mayflower Autonomous Ship revealed to the world
Mayflower Autonomous Ship Launches
An unmanned voyage in the wake of the Mayflower
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