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28 every previous attempt (numbering in the dozens) to do so has also failed. And the latest attempt, launched by Project Mahi in late 2021 (attempted using its Mahi 2 solar USV) lost comms roughly 700 nautical miles short of its destination of Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, at the end of January 2022. “But our ship came back, which was extremely rare among such attempts, and we repaired it,” Phaneuf says. “It remains on the water undergoing smaller-scale trials, and come the spring of 2022, we’re going to attempt the voyage again.” Scott adds, “We’re strong believers in ‘full-contact engineering’, not ‘PowerPoint engineering’. The truly valuable lessons come from getting the ship out on the water and testing it against real waves and weather to see what breaks first each time, not from running limited simulations from your desk. “That’s why we’ve kept the ship on the water, racking up hours since that first attempt, because that’s how unmanned systems and technologies advance.” The Mayflower’s architecture Defining the physical constraints and key component locations was one of the first tasks carried out by Phaneuf and Scott, as much for construction considerations as for weight and balance of the MAS, which is a trimaran made mostly from aluminium (with minimal amounts of composites). “Since we wanted the main purpose of this ship to be a research platform for huge numbers of organisations concerned about the ocean, we knew we’d need a very big cargo bay to allow for payloads, instrumentation and experiments of any feasible size,” Scott says. The computing elements have largely been installed ad hoc, and comprise an edge computing system based on Nvidia Jetson AGX Xaviers for the computer vision processing and several other devices, but some subsystems’ locations were non-negotiable. For example, solar panels cover much of the top deck of the ship, and about two- February/March 2022 | Unmanned Systems Technology The Mayflower’s hull is largely aluminium for ease of fabrication, modification and adaptability to changing design considerations The ship came back from its trial voyage, which is rare. It remains on the water undergoing smaller-scale trials, and in the spring we’ll attempt the voyage again