Austin-born IBM tech to help guide autonomous ship

Mayflower Pilgrims spent months out at sea until they hit land in 1620.

Almost 400 years later, a nonprofit called ProMare is planning on making the trek with a fully autonomous ship -- in part using technology born in Austin.

Central to the project is IBM’s PowerAI Vision technology, which will help data scientists formulate models that will make possible the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the autonomous ship in September 2020.

IBM’s servers, along with its cloud and edge computing technologies, will help facilitate the project before and during the voyage, which is expected to take about two weeks.

PowerAI Vision was developed in Central Texas, by a team at the IBM Austin Research Laboratory.

“Every now and again, you get to show off something kind of cool,” said Mike Hollinger, IBM’s chief architect of machine vision platforms.

Hollinger said the project is an opportunity to showcase the platform’s ability to function in unpredictable — and sometimes chaotic — situations.

The technology will allow data scientists to collect and process imaging data into models that can be used to guide the ship safely through the Atlantic, Hollinger said.

The project will also give the IBM team a chance to identify ways it can streamline PowerAI Vision's ability to work with a variety of systems.

“We want to show how the software interacts and acts a force multiplier, to be honest, for other parts of the software stack,” Hollinger said.

ProMare, established in 2001, was created to advance marine research and exploration. The organization has a for-profit arm called Submergence Group, which has a corporate office in Round Rock.

ProMare and IBM announced the partnership this week, along with details of the project, titled the “Mayflower Autonomous Ship.”

Three research pods will be placed in the autonomous ship and be used to study maritime cybersecurity and marine mammal monitoring, as well as sea level mapping and ocean plastics.

The University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom is also participating in the project to lead the marine and maritime research, according to a news  release, along with the University of Birmingham, which will be responsible for the virtual and augmented reality technology used in the project.

Construction of the autonomous ship is underway in Poland by shipbuilding company Aluship Technology.

“With this project, we are pioneering a cost-effective and flexible platform for gathering data that will help safeguard the health of the ocean and the industries it supports,” Brett Phaneuf, co-director of ProMare’s autonomous ship project, said in a written statement.

Gregg Cook, chairman of ProMare, told the American-Statesman the ship could be used on other projects if all goes well on its maiden voyage.

“That won’t be the end of it,” Cook said. “If everything is successful and if everything is looking good and we’re ready to go, we’ll probably truck it to the west coast and sail the Pacific.”