(News) – An unmanned robotic ship attempting to trace Mayflower’s 1620 sea voyage has finally landed off the coast of North America, this time in Canada instead of the Massachusetts coast where it landed. more than 400 years ago. The sleek freestanding trimaran docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Sunday, after more than five weeks of crossing the Atlantic Ocean from England, according to technology company IBM, which helped build it. Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 50-foot Mayflower autonomous ship had no captain, no sailors or humans on board, although it could have helped to have a mechanic, the AP reports.
“The technology that makes up the standalone system worked perfectly, seamlessly,” said Rob High, an IBM IT executive involved in the project. “Mechanically, we had problems.” His first attempt at a transatlantic voyage to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in June 2021 was hampered by technical problems, which forced the ship to return to its home port of Plymouth, England. He returned from England almost a year later on April 27, bound for Virginia, but a generator problem diverted him to the Azores in Portugal, where a member of the team flew for repairs. emergency. Further problems on the high seas occurred in late May when the ship bound for the United States developed a problem with the charging circuit of the generator’s starting batteries.
AI software is improving to help self-driving machines understand their environment and drive themselves, but most robots cannot be cured when the hardware goes wrong. The non-profit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the ship, switched to a safe navigation computer on May 30 and headed for Halifax, which was further close to any American destination. The ship’s webcam on Sunday morning showed it was being towed by a larger ship as the horizon of Halifax approached, a safety requirement under international maritime standards, IBM said.
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