Abstract
This article discusses a control architecture for autonomous sailboat navigation and also presents a sailboat prototype built for experimental validation of the proposed architecture. The main goal is to allow long endurance autonomous missions, such as ocean monitoring. As the system propulsion relies on wind forces instead of motors, sailboat techniques are introduced and discussed, including the needed sensors, actuators and control laws. Mathematical modeling of the sailboat, as well as control strategies developed using PID and fuzzy controllers to control the sail and the rudder are also presented. Furthermore, we also present a study of the hardware architecture that enables the system overall performance to be increased. The sailboat movement can be planned through predetermined geographical way-points provided by a base station. Simulated and experimental results are presented to validate the control architecture, including tests performed on a lake. Underwater robotics can rely on such a platform by using it as a basis vessel, where autonomous charging of unmanned vehicles could be done or else as a relay surface base station for transmitting data.
Highlights
Oceans play a key role in global climate control
Besides their great potential for sustainability, another main advantage of using sailboats instead of boats with a screw-propeller is that while the last consumes the greater part of its energy with propulsion, a sailboat uses wind for propulsion, reducing the required electrical energy, which increases its potentiality for payload. Such feature makes the use of sailboats an attractive approach, mainly in cases of long running missions, where velocity is not an issue. It can serve as a base station for other short-range underwater vehicles or a UAV team operating in a sea area
The controller should bring the boat from an initial point to a target defined by the user in the base station
Summary
Oceans play a key role in global climate control. Scientists, such as Lovelock [1,2], argue that the ocean is one of the most frequently overlooked environments; it is amongst the most severely affected, making scientists and the population each time more interested in monitoring it. These boats are often called wind vane servomechanisms [3] Besides their great potential for sustainability, another main advantage of using sailboats instead of boats with a screw-propeller is that while the last consumes the greater part of its energy with propulsion, a sailboat uses wind for propulsion, reducing the required electrical energy, which increases its potentiality for payload (applications). Such feature makes the use of sailboats an attractive approach, mainly in cases of long running missions, where velocity is not an issue. It can serve as a base station for other short-range underwater vehicles or a UAV team operating in a sea area
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