Satellite AIS data provider exactEarth has joined the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) project, an international effort led by ProMare and IBM to build an unmanned, fully autonomous transatlantic research vessel to launch on the fourth centenary of the original Mayflower voyage.
exactEarth will supply live satellite AIS data into the mission’s operations centre to augment the local data collected by the ship’s onboard AIS transceiver, as well as providing its VHF-based M2M satellite communications service to upload sensor data in real-time from the ship’s onboard weather station, via an onboard transmitter.
The company’s satellite AIS payloads, hosted onboard the Iridium NEXT constellation of satellites, tracks a population of more than 500,000 vessels worldwide and generates Average Global Revisit rates and Average Latency rates of less than one minute.
The M2M data service uses the international Application Specific Messages (ASM) standard for information exchange via AIS to collect data from sensors on a range of maritime assets. ASM is part of the ongoing evolution of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) standard into the VHF Data Exchange System (VDES).
“We are pleased to be a part of a prestigious group that is collaborating on ways to leverage advances in technology to enhance both the future of global shipping as well as our environmental relationship with the world’s oceans,” said Peter Dorcas, Vice President, Business Development at exactEarth.
“This is a unique opportunity for us to trial exactSeNS (the ASM data collection service) as part of an initiative that, if successful, could lead to the greater adoption of autonomous shipping as well as demonstrating how the service could create new opportunities for exactEarth in the broader maritime information market.”
