Abstract
This work presents a small and affordable autonomous sailboat platform designed to be transported and operated by one or two people without any special means. The sailboat is based on a RC One Meter class vessel equipped with a low power 8-bit microcontroller board and a set of navigation sensors (compass, GPS, wind vane, ...) and a 868 MHz RF module. It has been designed to serve as a low cost replicable testbed platform for research in autonomous sailing. The embedded control system makes the sailboat completely autonomous to sail a route determined as a sequence of waypoints, adapting its sailing point dynamically to wind conditions. The control system is completed with an off-board base station that permits to monitor and control the boat or defining a new route. The system is characterized by its long autonomy and robustness in case of communication failures.
This work has been partially funded by Canary Government and FEDER funds under ACIISI ProId2010/0062
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Cabrera-Gámez, J., Ramos de Miguel, A., Domínguez-Brito, A.C., Hernández-Sosa, J.D., Isern-González, J., Fernández-Perdomo, E. (2014). An Embedded Low-Power Control System for Autonomous Sailboats. In: Bars, F., Jaulin, L. (eds) Robotic Sailing 2013. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02276-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02276-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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