Department of Computer Sciences Autonomous Sailing Boats Seminar aus Informatik (SS 2011) Eingereicht von: Christian Alt (0721203),
[email protected] Natalie Wittinghofer (0620614),
[email protected] Angefertigt am: Institut of Computer Science Salzburg Betreuung: Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Wolfgang Pree Salzburg, Juni 2011 CONTENTS I Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Applications for autonomous sail boats 2 3 Hardware 3 3.1 Boats . .3 3.2 Sails . .4 3.3 Microcontroller and Sensors . .5 4 Software Architecture 8 4.1 Top-down planner based Model . .8 4.2 Bottom-up reactive system . .9 4.3 Hybrid architecture . .9 5 Communication 11 6 Control System 14 6.1 Control System by Abril and Salom [4] . 14 6.2 Control System by Stelzer et al. [18] . 15 7 Collision Avoidance 18 7.1 A Reactive Approach to Collision Avoidance . 18 7.2 A Raycast Approach to Collision Avoidance . 20 8 Simulation and testing 22 9 Conclusion 23 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1 Introduction Over the past decade there has been intense scientific work on autonomous sailing boats. As hardware gets smaller, cheaper and also better performing the possibilities increase for autonomous vessels. Recently there is a lot of research going on with the aim of reducing CO2 emissions. Au- tonomous sailing boats fit perfectly into these ambitions. Challenges of Autonomous Sailing Boats Building and programming an autonomous sailing boat holds several challenges: • Hardware challenges: Equipping a robotic sailing boat with microcontroller, sen- sors, actuators and other special hardware needed (e.g. solar panels) is very difficult.