Promare and IBM engineers develop new class of marine AI to
advance $90BN autonomous shipping
market
IBM Edge, AI technologies and over a million images at core
of ship's ability to sense, think and act autonomously at
sea
PLYMOUTH, England, March
5, 2020 /CNW/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and marine research
organization Promare, have announced that a new 'AI Captain', which
will enable the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) to self-navigate
across the Atlantic later this year, is to go to sea this month for
testing. The trial, which will take place on a manned research
vessel off the coast of Plymouth
in the UK, will evaluate how the AI
Captain uses cameras, AI and edge computing systems to
safely navigate around ships, buoys and other ocean hazards that it
is expected to meet during its transatlantic voyage in September 2020.
MAS will trace the route of the original 1620 Mayflower to
commemorate the 400th anniversary of the famous voyage.
Sailing from Plymouth, UK to
Plymouth, Massachusetts with no
human captain or onboard crew, it will become one of the first
full-sized, fully autonomous vessels to cross the Atlantic. The
mission will further the development of commercial autonomous ships
and help transform the future of marine research.
"While the autonomous shipping market is set to grow from
$90BN today to over $130BN by 2030*, many of today's autonomous ships
are really just automated - robots which do not dynamically adapt
to new situations and rely heavily on operator override," said
Don Scott, CTO of the Mayflower
Autonomous Ship. "Using an integrated set of IBM's AI, cloud,
and edge technologies, we are aiming to give the Mayflower the
ability to operate independently in some of the most challenging
circumstances on the planet."
The trial begins
MAS will rely on IBM's advanced AI
and edge computing systems to sense, think and make decisions at
sea, even with no human intervention. With the three hulls of the
trimaran MAS currently reaching the final phase of construction in
Gdansk, Poland, a prototype of the
AI Captain will first take to the
water on a manned vessel - the Plymouth Quest - a research ship
owned and operated by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK. The
March sea trials, which will be conducted in waters of Smart Sound
Plymouth, under the watchful eye of the Plymouth Quest's human
crew, will help determine how the Mayflower's AI Captain performs
in real-world maritime scenarios, and provide valuable feedback to
help refine the ship's machine learning models.
Two years of training and a million nautical images
Over the past two years, the Mayflower team has been training the
ship's AI models using over a million nautical images collected
from cameras in the Plymouth Sound in the UK as well as open source
databases. To meet the processing demands of machine learning, the
team used an IBM Power AC922 fuelled by IBM Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA
V100 Tensor Core GPUs, the same technologies behind the world's
smartest AI supercomputers. Now, using IBM's computer vision
technology, the Mayflower's AI Captain should be able to
independently detect and classify ships, buoys and other hazards
such as land, breakwaters and debris.
Keeping things local
As the Mayflower will not have
access to high-bandwidth connectivity throughout its transatlantic
voyage, it will use a fully autonomous IBM edge computing system
powered by several onboard NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier devices. While
at sea, the Mayflower will process data locally on NVIDIA Jetson,
increasing the speed of decision making and reducing the amount of
data flow and storage on the ship.
"Edge computing is critical to making an autonomous ship like
the Mayflower possible. The Mayflower needs to sense its
environment, make smart decisions about its situation and then act
on these insights in the minimum amount of time – even in the
presence of intermittent connectivity, and all while keeping data
secure from cyber threats," said Rob
High, VP and CTO for Edge Computing, IBM. "IBM's edge
computing solutions are designed to support mission-critical
workloads like the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, extending the power
of the cloud and the security and flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux all the way out to the edge of the network, even in the
middle of the ocean."
Getting there (safely)
As well as following the
overall mission objectives to reach Plymouth, Massachusetts in the shortest amount
of time, the AI Captain will draw on IBM's rule management system
(Operational Decision Manager - ODM) to follow the International
Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) as well as
recommendations from the International Convention for the
Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). Used widely across the
financial services industry, ODM is particularly suited to the
Mayflower project as it provides a completely transparent record of
its decision-making process, avoiding 'black box' scenarios.
As the weather is one of the most significant factors impacting
the success of the voyage, the AI Captain will use forecast data
from The Weather Company to help make navigation decisions. A
Safety Manager function (running on RHEL) will review all of the AI
Captain's decisions to ensure they are safe – for the Mayflower,
and for other vessels in its vicinity.
A real-world scenario – how the Mayflower senses, thinks and
acts at sea
For example, let's assume that the Mayflower is
in the open ocean, approaching
Cape Cod, with no current
satellite connectivity. In its path ahead is a cargo ship which has
had a collision with a fishing vessel and spilt some of its load.
In this hypothetical scenario, the Mayflower's AI Captain will use
the following technologies and processes to independently assess
the situation, and decide what action to take:
Senses (assesses current environment & identifies
hazards)
- Radar detects multiple hazards in MAS's path, 2.5 nautical
miles ahead
- Onboard cameras provide visual input to IBM computer vision
system which identifies hazards as: a cargo ship, a fishing vessel
and three partially submerged shipping containers floating in the
water
- Automatic Identification System (AIS) provides specific
information about the cargo ship's class, weight, speed, cargo,
etc.
- GPS Navigation System – provides MAS's current location,
heading, speed and course
- MAS's nautical chart server provides geospatial information
about its chosen route
- Weather data provided by The Weather Company
- Attitude Sensors – assess local sea state (how MAS pitches and
rolls due to waves)
- Fathometer – provides water depth measurements
- Vehicle Management System – provides operational data such as
MAS's battery charge level, power consumption, communications,
science payloads etc.
Thinks (evaluates options)
- IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) evaluates COLREGs with
respect to the other vessels in the vicinity and generates a risk
map indicating an "unsafe" situation ahead
- MAS's AI Captain ingests the ODM recommendation, computer
vision input, current and forecasted weather and assesses several
options to avoid hazard
Acts (chooses best actions and instructs
vessel)
- AI Captain determines the best action for MAS, in this
hypothetical scenario, is to steer to starboard to avoid the
unexpected navigation hazard
- MAS's Safety Manager verifies the decision as safe
- AI Captain instructs MAS's Vehicle Management system to change
course and speed.
As the ocean is an ever-changing dynamic environment, the AI
Captain will constantly re-evaluate the situation and update the
course of the Mayflower as situations evolve.
The March sea trials will take place for approximately two
months on the Plymouth Quest with the ship's human captain and crew
at the helm. In the first stage if testing, the Mayflower AI
Captain's inference engine will receive input from the Quest's
radar, AIS, GPS and navigation system, as well as data about
visibility. Cameras, computer vision, edge and autonomy
capabilities will be added in the next phase of testing from
April.
Media Assets
For photos, broll and other materials
related to the Mayflower project, please visit:
https://newsroom.ibm.com/then-and-now
Notes
*https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/autonomous-ships-market
Media contacts
Jonathan
Batty
IBM Europe
jjbatty@ibm.com
+44 7741 113871
Carrie Bendzsa
IBM North America
carrie.bendzsa@ca.ibm.com
+1 613-796-3880
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SOURCE IBM