Canary Island Team Wins World Robotic Sailing 2016

September 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

If you’re like us, you had no idea that there even was a World Robotic Sailing Championship. But we’re glad that we do now! And congratulations to the team of A-Tirma G2, the winning boat. (Link in Spanish, difficult to translate — if you can figure out how, post in the comments?)

The Championship has apparently been going on for nine years now, and moves to a different location around the world each year. The contests for 2016 (PDF) are by no means trivial. Besides a simple there-and-back regatta, the robot boats have to hold position, scan a prescribed area, and avoid a big obstacle and return quickly back to their lane. All of this with wind power, of course.

The winning boat used solid sails, which act essentially as vertical wings, and was designed for rough weather. This paid off in the area-scanning test; the winds were so strong that the organizers considered calling it off, but team A-Tirma’s boat navigated flawlessly, giving them enough points to win the event even though camera malfunction kept them from completing the obstacle avoidance.

Unless you’ve sailed, it’s hard to appreciate the difficulty of these challenges to an autonomous vehicle. It’s incredibly hard to plan far ahead because the boat’s motive power source, the wind, isn’t constant. But the boat has, relatively speaking, a lot of inertia and no brakes, so the robot has to plan fairly far in advance. That any of the 2-4 meter long boats could stay inside a circle of 20 meters is impressive. Oh, and did we mention that A-Tirma did all of this calculating and reacting on solar power?

Because the wind is so fickle, drone sailboats are much less popular than drone motorboats — at least using the Hackaday Blogpost Metric ™. The hackerboat project is trying out sails, but they’re still mostly working on powered propulsion. We do have an entry in the 2016 Hackaday Prize, but it’s looking like the development process is in the doldrums. Still, sailing is the best way to go in the end, because windpower is essentially free on the open ocean, which means less work for the solar panels.

As far as role-models go, you’ve basically got the entrants in the World Robotic Sailing Championships. So kudos to the A-Tirma team, and thanks [Nikito] for the tip!

A Green Powered Sailboat

April 25, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Drones fill the sky raining hellfire on unsuspecting civilians below. Self-driving cars only cause half as many accidents as carbon-based drivers. Autonomous vehicles are the future, no matter how bleak that future is. One thing we haven’t seen much of is autonomous marine vehicles, be they submarines, hovercrafts, or sailboats. That’s exactly what [silvioBi] is building for his entry into the Hackaday Prize: a sailboat that will ply the waters of Italy’s largest lake.

Every boat needs a hull, but this project will need much more, from electronics to solar panels to sensors. Luckily for [silvio], choosing a hull is as simple as heading over to eBay. [silvio] picked up a fiberglass boat hull for about €40 that fill fit both is needs and his workbench.

The electronics are a bit trickier, but the basic plan is to cover the deck with solar panels, and use a few sensors including GPS, IMU, and an anemometer to steer this sailboat around a lake. Building an autonomous vehicle is a hard challenge, and for the electronics, [silvio] has a trick up his sleeve: he’s using redundant electronics. All the sensors are connected via an I2C bus, so why not put two microcontrollers on that bus in a master and slave configuration? It won’t add much mass, and given the problems had by a few of the teams behind robotic sailing competitions, a bit of redundancy isn’t a bad thing to have.

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Amateur Builds Super Deep Super Cheap Ocean Vehicle

December 19, 2014 by Matt Freund 41 Comments

During the summers [Doug] has been building a 75 foot sailing junk to be launched from America’s most inland port. When Oklahoma’s winter hits he heads indoors to work on an ROV that will prowl 3,000 feet below the surface. Originally building a piloted submarine, he grew bored and decided to use the sailboat as a carrier for his fleet of remote submersibles instead.

A consummate amateur, [Doug] is the first to admit how little he knows about anything and how much he enjoys the open source spirit: collaboration, cooperation and learning from others. Determination and hard work fills in everything in between.

Hackaday covered the beginnings of his ROV last winter. In the year since it has progressed from some sketches and a 10″ steel pipe turned into a pressure testing rig to a nearly-complete, 10 foot long, custom-lathed 4″ aluminum torpedo laying on his shop table. In a bow-to-stern walk-through [Doug] shows how he is building science equipment for less than a penny on the dollar by using largely off-the-shelf imaginatively-repurposed parts or things he could fabricate himself with only a lathe and a 3d printer.

Continue after the break for a breakdown of the tech used.

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Home Depot Brand Boat Costs $29.18

May 22, 2014 by Rich Bremer 26 Comments

hdboat

It is a common belief (or fact, depending who you talk to) that boats are money pits. Surely, it is a fun past time even for the lucky person flipping the bill, but what if you could build a boat from locally found and purchased items. [Bill] did just this and he did it for a mere $30. His creation is affectionately called Thunder Bucket.

The overall design is a pontoon-based sail boat. You’ll notice from the photo that the pontoons are made from many 5 gallon buckets attached together. The wood frame and deck come courtesy of old pallets that were taken apart. The mast is a fence post and a standard blue tarp rounds out the resourcefulness as it is used for the sail.

Admittedly, this may not be the coolest boat on the waterways but it is a boat, it’s made from non-boat-like items and it works. Believe it or not [Bill] is a professional boat builder. Sometimes ‘why not?’ is the best reason to do something.

Ride, Captain, Ride Aboard Your Arduino-Controlled Autopiloted Sailboat

January 8, 2014 by Kristina Panos 22 Comments

[Jack], a mechanical engineer, loom builder, and avid sailor wanted an autopilot system for his 1983 Robert Perry Nordic 40 sailboat with more modern capabilities than the one it came with. He knew a PC-based solution would work, but it was a bit out of reach. Once his son showed him an Arduino, though, he was on his way. He sallied forth and built this Arduino-based autopilot system for his sloop, the Wile E. Coyote.

He’s using two Arduino Megas. One is solely for the GPS, and the other controls everything else. [Jack]’s autopilot has three modes. In the one he calls knob steering, a potentiometer drives the existing hydraulic pump, which he controls with a Polulu Qik serial DC motor controller. In compass steering mode, a Pololu IMU locks in the heading to steer (HTS). GPS mode uses a predetermined waypoint, and sets the course to steer (CTS) to the same bearing as the waypoint.

[Jack]’s system also uses cross track error (XTE) correction to calculate a new HTS when necessary. He has fantastic documentation and several Fritzing and Arduino files available on Dropbox.

Autopilot sailboat rigs must be all the rage right now. We just saw a different one back in November.

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Sailing With An Autopilot

November 12, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

sailboat

After seeing an autopilot for a kayak a few days ago, [Mike] thought he should send in his version of a water-borne autopilot. Compared to something that fits in a one-man kayak, [Mike]’s creation is a monstrous device, able to keep a largeish sailboat on a constant heading.

To keep track of the ship’s bearing, [Mike] is using a very cool digital compass that uses LEDs to keep a steady heading. Also included is an amazingly professional and very expensive 6 axis IMU. To actually steer the ship, [Mike] is using a linear actuator attached to the tiller powered by a huge 60 Amp motor controller. The actuator only draws about 750 mA, but if [Mike] ever needs an autopilot for a container ship or super tanker, the power is right there.

For control, [Mike] ended up using an Arduino, 16-button keypad, and an LCD display. With this, he can put his autopilot into idle, calibration, and run modes, as well as changing the ship’s heading by 1, 10, and 100 degrees port or starboard.

From a day of sailing, [Mike] can safely say his autopilot works very well. It’s able to keep a constant heading going downwind, and even has enough smarts to tack upwind.

Videos below.

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Building A 70-foot Sailboat In Oklahoma

July 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Call it a retirement plan, a hobby, or a beautiful expression of a mental imbalance, but [Doug and Kay Jackson] of Tulsa, OK are building a seventy-four foot steel sailboat in their backyard.

For the last few years, the couple has been working on the SV Seeker, a motor sail junk, since late 2011. They have a wonderful build log, but they’ve also gone the extra mile and documented the entire build process on video. Their YouTube channel is one of the best subscriptions you can have on the site, constantly updated with new portions of the build.

Yes, building an oceangoing ship in a landlocked state may seem like an ill-informed idea, but Tulsa, OK is the home of the port of Catoosa, about 400 miles and 20 locks from the Mississippi river, then another 600 miles to the Gulf of Mexico and the open ocean.

Below you can find some of the highlights of [Doug] and [Kay] fabricating the prop for their ship. First, a pattern was created with a CNC machine, then a mold was made to cast each blade in brass. It’s an impressive bit of work putting all these tools together, and you really get a sense of the challenge of building something this big.

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