Land Rover's AI team helps build 'faster' sailing boat

As artificial intelligence (AI) makes deeper inroads to improve our daily life, a group of Land Rover engineers have helped the British Land Rover BAR team by building a faster boat so that they could win the sailing competition America's Cup.

Using AI, the engineers worked for more than a year to find patterns in the boat's performance data which could be used to make it go faster, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Land Rover BAR is second in America's Cup World Series rankings, following a podium finish in Chicago in the US recently.

The next leg is in the island city of Portsmouth from July 21-24 when the team will try to close the 10-point gap to series leader Emirates Team New Zealand.

"Land Rover's AI could prove the difference in its bid to win the America's Cup for the first time for Britain," said Sir Ben Ainslie, Land Rover BAR Team's principal and skipper.

Land Rover has applied its big data processing power and machine learning expertise to help co-engineer the fastest boat in America's Cup history.

During the testing, the sailing team received over 16GB of uncompressed data per day from sensors on the boat - the equivalent of filling an Apple iPhone's memory.

The ability to process and make sense of this volume of data is unprecedented in sailing which is a perfect application for technologies such as AI because there are many variables -- mainly the wind.

"Something that would have taken weeks can now be achieved instantaneously thanks to Land Rover's computing power and real-time analysis," the company said in a statement.

Jaguar Land Rover's self-learning car is working to provide the ultimate intelligent driving experience by understanding and working with the driver's personal preferences.

America's Cup, affectionately known as the "Auld Mug", is a trophy awarded to the winner of the America's Cup match races between two sailing yachts.

--IANS

na/bg