183 research outputs found

    Autonomous Sailboat Navigation

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    The purpose of this study was to investigate novel methods on an unmanned sailing boat, which enables it to sail fully autonomously, navigate safely, and perform long-term missions. The author used robotic sailing boat prototypes for field experiments as his main research method. Two robotic sailing boats have been developed especially for this purpose. A compact software model of a sailing boat's behaviour allowed for further evaluation of routing and obstacle avoidance methods in a computer simulation. The results of real-world experiments and computer simulations are validated against each other. It has been demonstrated that autonomous boat sailing is possible by the effective combination of appropriate new and novel techniques that will allow autonomous sailing boats to create appropriate routes, to react properly on obstacles and to carry out sailing manoeuvres by controlling rudder and sails. Novel methods for weather routing, collision avoidance, and autonomous manoeuvre execution have been proposed and successfully demonstrated. The combination of these techniques in a layered hybrid subsumption architecture make robotic sailing boats a promising tool for many applications, especially in ocean observation

    Idiosyncrasies of Sports Law in Sailing Regattas

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    The aim of this paper is to outline a segment of lex sportiva that is grounded in the idiosyncrasies of the internal rules of the hearing procedure in sports sailing whereby the fundamental principles and concepts of sports law as well as the bodies involved in the process of forming sports law are being analysed. For this purpose, the general notion of sailing, its theoretical systematization and the basic features of its sports variant will be presented, in the context of which the organization, rules and regulations will be considered i.e. basic documents including the fundamental legal principles of sports law represented in the relevant sport, all of which for the purpose of re-establishing the sports law, its concept and nature i.e. its potentially interdisciplinary character. To this extent, the re-establishment of sports law and its specific features will be highlighted particularly through appropriate examples of court and arbitration practices as well as the specific rules of sports sailing, part of which are also the rules on the hearing procedure which will be roughly presented and thereby their compliance with the fundamental principles of sports law will be accordingly analysed

    Parameter Tuning of the Autonomous Boat in Fish Farming Industry with Design of Experiment

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    This research studied the feasibility in applying the flight controller of the unmanned aerial vehicle on a pontoon boat in fish farming industry. A small-scale autonomous pontoon boat has been built, equipped with the open-hardware flight controller, GPS receiver, Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and the magnetometer. A 23 factorial design based on Design of Experiment (DOE) is carried out to study the influence of three parameters (turn_rate, turn_angle and damping) on the response variable (peak-to-peak deviation from the desired trajectory). Total 24 experiments have been conducted by setting the desired trajectory as a circle with diameter 20 m. The peak-to-peak deviation in each experiment has been observed. The analyses revealed that the damping has low interaction with the turn angle and turn rate while there is a stronger interaction between the turn angle and turn rate. And the peak-to-peak deviation of the trajectory tends to decrease when the parameter damping was set to high value. The regression model has been derived and plotted as a response surface.  The optimized parameters were selected from the plot and perform the experiment with three replications. The results confirm that parameters tuning has improved the performance of the boat significantly. With the DOE approach, the impact of two or more parameters on a response, the interaction between parameters can be investigated systematically. This approach is an effective way to tuning the parameters and can be applied to various kinds of the autonomous vehicle.   A 23 factorial design based on Design of Experiment (DOE) is carried out to study the influence of three parameters (turn_rate, turn_angle and damping) on the response variable (peak-to-peak deviation from the desired trajectory). Total 24 experiments have been conducted by setting the desired trajectory as a circle with diameter 20 m. The peak-to-peak deviation in each experiment has been observed.   The analyses revealed that the damping has low interaction with the turn angle and turn rate while there is a stronger interaction between the turn angle and turn rate. And the peak-to-peak deviation of the trajectory tends to decrease when the parameter damping was set to high value. The regression model has been derived and plotted as a response surface.  The optimized parameters were selected from the plot and perform the experiment with three replications. The results confirm that parameters tuning has improved the performance of the boat significantly.   With the DOE approach, the impact of two or more parameters on a response, the interaction between parameters can be investigated systematically. This approach is an effective way to tuning the parameters and can be applied to various kinds of the autonomous vehicle

    FASt - An autonomous sailing platform for oceanographic missions

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    Sailing has been for long times the only means of ship propulsion at sea. Although the performance of a sailing vessel is well below the present power driven ships, either in terms of navigation speed and predictability, wind energy is absolutely renewable, clean and free. Unmanned autonomous sailing boats may exhibit a virtually unlimited autonomy and be able to perform unassisted missions at sea for long periods of time. Promising applications include oceanographic and weather data collecting, surveillance and even military applications. The Microtransat competition, launched in Europe in 2006, has been a key initiative to promote the development of robotic unmanned sailing boats. Various regattas have taken place across Europe and the ultimate challenge will be a transatlantic race. This paper presents an autonomous sailing boat developed at the University of Porto, Portugal, with emphasis on the hardware and software computing infrastructure. This platform is capable of carrying a few kilograms of sensing equipment that can be hooked to the boat's main computer, also providing support for short and long range data communications

    WPI Sailbot 2018-2019

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    The goal of this Major Qualifying Project, or MQP, is to create an autonomous sailboat, known as ”The Wide Awake”, that builds upon lessons learned from previous WPI Sailbot projects. The team used the International Robotics Sailing Regatta (IRSR) rules to guide the creation of the boat for the 2019 competition. These guidelines included, but were not limited to, the following challenges: precision navigation, fleet race, and endurance. The final products of this MQP were a more mechanically and technically reliable boat, a better navigation system, and a user-friendly guide on how to run and manage ”The Wide Awake”

    A recongurable computing system for an autonomous sailboat

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    This paper presents the computing infrastructureused in an autonomous unmanned smallscalesailboat. The system is build on a reconfigurableFPGA and includes custom designed interfacesfor the various sensors and actuators usedin the sailboat. The central processing unit isa 32-bit RISC microprocessor (Microblaze fromXILINX) implemented as a soft IP (IntellectualProperty) core, running at a maximum frequencyof 50 MHz. The computing system runs uClinux,a simplified version of the popular Linux operatingsystem. The usage of a reconfigurable platformenables the possibility to reconfigure completelythe processing and control hardware system.This facilitates enormously the developmentof the control system and allows the selection ofdifferent hardware control systems, according tothe navigation requirements and environmentalconditions

    eVentos 2 - Autonomous sailboat control

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    Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresSailboat navigation started as a way to explore the world. Even though performance is significantly lower than that of a motorboat, in terms of resources, these vessels still are the best low-cost solutions. On the past, navigation depended greatly on estimates or on the stars. Nowadays it depends on precise data provided by a variety of electronic devices, independent from the user’s location. Autonomous sailboats are vessels that use only the wind for propulsion and have the capacity to control its sails and rudders without human intervention. These particularities give them almost unlimited autonomy and a very valuable ability to fulfill long term missions on the sea, such as collecting oceanographic data, search and rescue or surveillance. This dissertation presents a fuzzy logic controller for autonomous sailboats based on a proposed set of sensors, namely a GPS receiver, a weather meter and an electronic compass. Following a basic navigation approach, the proposed set of sensorswas studied in order to obtain an effective group of variables for the controller’s fuzzy sets, and rules for its rule base. In the end, four fuzzy logic controllers were designed, one for the sail(to maximize speed) and three for the rudder (in order to comply with all navigation situations). The result is a sailboat control system capable of operation in a low cost platform such as an Arduino prototyping board. Simulated results obtained from a data set of approximately 100 tests to each controller back up the theory presented for the controller’s operation, since physical experimentation was not possible

    A reactive approach to obstacle avoidance in autonomous sailing.

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    This paper presents a reactive approach to obstacle avoidance for autonomous sailboats. It is an extension to the short course routing method published by Stelzer and Pr¨oll in 2008 which enables it to deal with obstacles in real-time. First simulation results are promising. The algorithm enables an autonomous sailboat to circumnavigate differently sized obstacles under various wind conditions successfully
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