Abstract
Over the past two decades, scholars developed various unmanned sailboat platforms, but most of them have specialized designs and controllers. Whereas these robotic sailboats have good performance with open-source designs, it is actually hard for interested researchers or fans to follow and make their own sailboats with these open-source designs. Thus, in this paper, a generic and flexible unmanned sailboat platform with easy access to the hardware and software architectures is designed and tested. The commonly used 1-m class RC racing sailboat was employed to install Pixhawk V2.4.8, Arduino Mega 2,560, GPS module M8N, custom-designed wind direction sensor, and wireless 433 Mhz telegram. The widely used open-source hardware modules were selected to keep reliable and low-cost hardware setup to emphasize the generality and feasibility of the unmanned sailboat platform. In software architecture, the Pixhawk V2.4.8 provided reliable states’ feedback. The Arduino Mega 2,560 received estimated states from Pixhawk V2.4.8 and the wind vane sensor, and then controlled servo actuators of rudder and sail using simplified algorithms. Due to the complexity of introducing robot operating system and its packages, we designed a generic but real-time software architecture just using Arduino Mega 2,560. A suitable line-of-sight guidance strategy and PID-based controllers were used to let the autonomous sailboat sail at user-defined waypoints. Field tests validated the sailing performance in facing WRSC challenges. Results of fleet race, station keeping, and area scanning proved that our design and algorithms could control the 1-m class RC sailboat with acceptable accuracy. The proposed design and algorithms contributed to developing educational, low-cost, micro class autonomous sailboats with accessible, generic, and flexible hardware and software. Besides, our sailboat platform also facilitates readers to develop similar sailboats with more focus on their missions.
Highlights
Prior autonomous sailboats generally had a large dimension with rich hardware modules, FIGURE 2 | Summary of papers published in International Robotic Sailing Conference (IRSC) activities
The basic idea is to provide a hardware and software scheme for interested researchers to build their own autonomous sailboat. Based on this worthwhile goal, a 1-m class autonomous sailboat was designed with the commonly-used remote control (RC) sailboats, which could participate in World Robotic Sailing Championship (WRSC) activities
Inspiring researchers and students to widely participate in science and technology aspects of robotic sailboat research is a laudable goal, in view of ocean science worldwide data demand
Summary
A total of 93 papers were published in last ten IRSC activities, which included topics of sailboat platforms and applications, mission planning, obstacle avoidance, and controllers and sensors. Prior autonomous sailboats generally had a large dimension with rich hardware modules, FIGURE 2 | Summary of papers published in IRSC activities.
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