Powered by IBM's AI, the ship was designed and built by non-profit maritime research organization Promare.

With no human captain or onboard crew, IBM's Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) uses Artificial intelligence (AI) and the energy from the sun to travel further and reveal more about the ocean. Working in tandem with scientists and other autonomous vessels, MAS provides a flexible and cost-effective platform for deepening understanding of critical issues such as climate change, ocean plastic pollution, and marine mammal conservation. In parallel, the development of marine autonomous systems promises to transform ocean-related industries such as shipping, oil, and gas, telecommunications, security and defense, fishing, and aquaculture.

Powered by IBM's AI, the ship was designed and built by the non-profit maritime research organization Promare. Mayflower AI's main purpose is to reach places where no robot has gone before, and collect oodles of data from our oceans.

Per an IBM white paper:

Just as IBM has been instrumental in the development of the Mayflower's AI Captain, it has also helped global enterprises solve many critical operational challenges. When used in conjunction with our DecisionsFirst™ approach, IBM solutions can help your organization achieve positive business outcomes by streamlining business processes, minimizing manual effort, integrating AI-based insights for better decision-making, and solving inefficiencies—especially for customers.

IBM engineered the crewless ship with three layers of technology: sensory inputs, real-time machine learning and analytics, and a decision engine. IBM experts used petabytes of data to train machine learning models and wrote rules-based decisioning for the decision engine, enabling the ship to react to an often-treacherous ocean environment — with zero human intervention. It adheres to maritime law while making crucial split-second decisions. It reroutes itself around harsh weather environments. It collects and analyzes massive amounts of ocean data. And it does it all, 24/7.

By extending the ship's groundbreaking intelligent automation, operational decision-making, edge computing and AI-powered remote monitoring technologies across industries, we can pave the way for the next generation of innovation, efficiency, safety, and cost-savings in your business.

How does Mayflower AI work?

As mentioned by IBM, Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) is equipped with three layers of technology — sensory inputs, real-time machine learning and analytics, and a decision engine. Engineers used petabytes of data to train the machine learning model. The decision engine is suited to ruled-based decision making, allowing the ship to navigate the ocean with no human intervention. MAS reroutes itself around harsh weather conditions and collects and analyses ocean data round the clock. Although MAS makes crucial decisions in split seconds, it adheres to all maritime laws.

Equipped with solar-powered vessels, MAS remarkably cuts down on the time and costs of hiring scientists. The autonomous ship travels to collect data from the remotest and most dangerous realms of the ocean. Scientists and researchers stationed on land download the live data and images synced to the cloud. MAS is armed with an electronic tongue called the HyperTaste to detect data, including ocean chemistry or whale songs.

The autonomous ship also has AI-powered sensors used to analyse the data collected to help scientists derive insights at a much higher speed.