A crewless robotic boat retracing the 1620 sea voyage of the Mayflower has landed near Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.

The sleek Mayflower Autonomous Ship met with an escort boat as it approached the Massachusetts shoreline, more than 400 years after its namesake’s historic voyage from England.

The original Mayflower called into Dartmouth for repairs on August 23 1620 mooring upstream at what is now called Pilgrim Hill. She arrived with her sister ship the Speedwell which was taking on water and eventually had to abandon the voyage carrying the Pilgrim Fathers across the Atlantic from Plymouth. The two ships stayed in Dartmouth for around a week.

Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 15-metre trimaran didn’t have a captain, navigator or any humans on board.

The ship’s first attempt to cross the Atlantic in 2021 was beset with technical problems, forcing her to return to her home port of Plymouth.

She set off from the English coast again in April but mechanical difficulties forced her to divert twice: first to Portugal’s Azores islands and then to Canada. On Monday, she departed Halifax, Nova Scotia bound for Plymouth Harbor in Massachusetts, where she docked later near a replica of the original Mayflower that brought the Pilgrim Fathers to America.

Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare worked with IBM to build the ship and has been using it to collect data about whales, microplastics pollution and for other scientific research. Small autonomous experimental vessels have crossed the Atlantic before but researchers describe it as the first ship of its size to do so.