Rolls-Royce has signed a deal with internet giant Google in a move intended to help the British engineering company to develop autonomous ships. Under the terms of the deal, Rolls-Royce will use Google's Cloud Machine Learning Engine to further train an AI-based object classification system that it has developed, for detecting, identifying and tracking the objects that a vessel might encounter at sea. The agreement, which the companies claim is the first of its kind in the marine sector, was signed today at the Google Cloud Summit event in Stockholm. Rolls-Royce has some 4,000 marine customers worldwide, including 70 navies. The Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine uses the same neural net-based machine intelligence software that powers many of Google's own products, such as image and voice search.