Second shot after lack of humans to fix simple issue crippled sea vessel
The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) is attempting to sail across the Atlantic Ocean with no humans on board again, after it failed three days into its first trip last year. Named after the 17th century vessel that carried over 100 passengers from England to what is now Massachusetts, the MAS was initially designed to retrace the historic route – but failed at the first attempt. This time, it’ll be going from Plymouth, UK to the US capital city Washington DC instead. The MAS began its 3,000-odd mile journey yesterday. Armed with four computers containing Intel processors, six Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier GPUs, two Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX boards, and a few other custom chips, the ship processes incoming data from a suite of cameras and sensors with machine learning software. Computer vision algorithms and radar help identify things like shipping containers, cargo ships, or fishing vessels to navigate around obstacles. If any of its hardware breaks down, however, there’s no one around to fix it – which proved to be a problem last time.
