Autonomous cargo hauling won't be limited to a handful of trucks and aircraft. As CNN reports, Yara International now expects to sail the first autonomous, fully electric cargo ship in Norway by the end of 2021. The Yara Birkeland will travel from Herøya to Brevik with only three remote control centers keeping watch over the journey. Yara first developed the concept in 2017 and had planned to set sail in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the trip. It's not the first crewless ship of any kind to venture forth (a Finnish ferry launched in 2018), but it is the first all-electric model.

The "Mayflower 400", the world's first intelligent ship, bobs gently in a light swell as it stops its engines in Plymouth Sound, off England's southwest coast, before self-activating a hydrophone designed to listen to whales. The 50-foot (15-metre) trimaran, which weighs nine tonnes and navigates with complete autonomy, is preparing for a transatlantic voyage. On its journey, the vessel, covered in solar panels, will study marine pollution and analyse plastic in the water, as well as track aquatic mammals. Eighty per cent of the underwater world remains unexplored. Brett Phaneuf, the co-founder of the charity ProMare and the mastermind behind the Mayflower project, said the ocean exerts "the most powerful force" on the global climate.

A cutting-edge, £1 million robot ship will cross the Atlantic Ocean unmanned next year to commemorate 400 years since the maiden voyage of the Mayflower to the USA. The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) will set off on its pioneering, 2,750-mile trip in September 2020, following in the trail of its namesake 400 years earlier. The 15-metre long, catamaran-style ship will be powered by state-of-the-art renewable energy. It will be unmanned but will have marine AI on board, and will be steered from a control room in Plymouth, Devon - where the original Mayflower set off from. It will carry three research pods, containing sensors and other equipment, which scientists hope will pave the way for ground-breaking research into ocean conditions for autonmous navigation.

As the sun rose over the Sonora Desert in late June, Mark Zuckerberg stood beside a runway not far from the Mexican border. Next to him stood Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh and a few other colleagues, all eyes on the strip of asphalt that stretched toward the horizon. They had arrived a little before dawn, and they were the latecomers. A team of Facebook technicians began prepping the launch at midnight the day before. Among them was Martin Gomez, who sat inside a trailer at the other end of this Army airfield near Yuma, Arizona, taking the crew through its "go"-"no go" checklist.