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30 Dossier | Mayflower Autonomous Ship Research payloads When talks first began with their partners across different scientific research disciplines, the Mayflower team would typically offer them about 1 m 3 of space aboard the vessel, in which they could request whatever instrumentation they wanted installed. The MAS400 team would integrate it, and connect a 24 or 48 V power input as well as network comms to synchronise with the timing, geo-referencing and other useful information from the USV’s main sensors. “Our partners have universally been very happy with that and come up with some really interesting tools to install on the ship,” Scott says. “For example, IBM put in something called Hypertaste, which actually ended up using the full volume allowed to them. It’s a seawater chemical analysis system, derived from a sensor assembly they originally designed for a vineyard in Switzerland to gauge the chemical content of brandy and wine.” To enable Hypertaste and other sensor systems to ‘taste’ the seawater, multiple standpipe ports are installed along the main hull to draw water into a tank that can then be pumped for sampling into the clients’ mission payloads. Phaneuf comments, “Another great one is a holographic microscope. Seawater flows through it and the microscope counts the zooplankton, phytoplankton and other particles and lifeforms to give scientists a breakdown of the February/March 2022 | Unmanned Systems Technology Our partners have all been very happy to come up with some really interesting tools for the ship, such as IBM’s Hypertaste seawater analysis system and a holographic microscope for counting zooplankton A GNSS complement from Veripos, an AHRS from iXblue, and IMUs from Silicon Sensing are among the critical navigation systems on board Among the many unique research instruments to be installed is Hypertaste, a chemical ‘tasting’ system from IBM originally developed for analysing brandies and wines