Founded in Autumn 2015, the Southampton Sailing Robot Team is well on track to sending the first Southampton Team to the World Robotic Sailing Championship 2016 in Portugal.
The competition consists of a set of challenges around sailing racing and data acquisition with autonomous vessels, moving towards persistent monitoring of our oceans.
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/KBZwdgfSnao
The students from Ship science, Engineering, Electronics and Computer Sciences, and the Faculty of Business, Law, and Art are currently crowd funding to supplement their competition cost and generate a starting budget for the next year.
A few more days to go, and £300 needed, maybe you are interested in donating to send them to Portugal – and receive rewards from stickers and postcards to joining for a Robot Boat Test day and getting a lesson in remote controlled sailing?
This year the Southampton will participate with a one metre boat in the Micro-Sailboat class, solving the challenges of sailing on a portable platform. Maybe you have already seen them testing their boat on campus, in the Southampton Common, the Itchen River, Eastleigh Lakes or the Solent. The boat regular gets attention, especially of passing by children who are fascinated by the small sailing boat.
Photos: in action
Sailing brings some special challenges: On the building side they have to make sure the electronics are waterproof, the boat doesn’t leak and that it is fast and reliable. On the software side, sailing brings some special routeing limitations: Whilst the next waypoint may be straight ahead, it can not be reached if the wind is coming from that direction! The sailing robot has to detect the wind direction on board and plan where it will tack to reach a waypoint located upwind.
Besides blogging about their endeavour, the Southampton Sailing Robot Team are making their work completely public. This means any sailing enthusiast or student working on a related project can easily get a sailing robot once they have a suitable sailing boat, based on their description of the electronic systems and the available firmware.