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
