AI captain! Self-sailing crewless ship to recreate historic Mayflower voyage

How does a ship chart its own course? The MAS's AI system, which uses 30 sensors and six AI cameras, is hinged on the latest computing technology – automation software, computer vision technology and the company's Red Hat Open Source software. Stanford-Clark explains that through computer learning, the ship's automated navigation system has been trained on thousands of images of things in the sea – "ships, seagulls, canoes, bits of wood, icebergs" – so it can recognize what's in front of and to the side of the ship. "That advises the AI captain to factor in things like the weather forecast, data from a radar and also the planned mission which it thinks it's going to go on, to then plot a course to obviously avoid ships, to steer away from storms," he says.