3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on July 15, 2010 at 10:06pm

Sweet--thanks for sharing! Can you share any details of your hardware and code setup?

(also, if you put the photo at the top of the post--you can edit and resave now--it will show up on the front page of the site and get more traffic)

Comment by bigkahuna on July 16, 2010 at 1:57am

Very cool project and a very nice looking boat!

Comment by Troy on July 16, 2010 at 8:31am

Nice!

Please share any/all details you can. I am working on an autonomous sailer and would love to look closer at your design / code exc..

Troy

Comment by Robbie Edwards on July 16, 2010 at 9:04am

Hey Troy
The code is quite unrefined at this point, I'm only 70% sure its doing what it is suppose to. There is a little more information on . I can send you the code if you like. The actual decisions the boat makes are quite simple, sail straight to the target if you can otherwise beat upwind. It works well in my MATLAB simulator but hasn't had much testing time on the water.
The hardware is a Ardu MEGA talking to an AIRMAR Pb150 ultrasonic wind instrument/ GPS, an HMC6343 tilt compensated compass, an Ardupilot board which handles the RC timing and an Xbee 900 pro which provides telemetry. It takes 2-3 people to set up the 3m tall wing sail on the boat. I'm starting to wish i had a 1m monohull RC boat. You could make it autonomous with much less. Probably an ardupilot, xbee,GPS, compass and a $10 home-made potentiometer based wind instrument rather than the $800 Airmar.
The fre-pivoting wing sail is nice because it sets itself aerodynamically and there are no ropes. However we are starting to realize we built it much too thick for the low Reynolds number airflow we are getting. Cloth sails will probably outperform the wing at this scale.

Comment by Robbie Edwards on July 16, 2010 at 9:05am

hyperlink didn't work. www.wfdn.ca

Developer Comment by jasonshort on July 16, 2010 at 9:23am

I'll have a look at the code if you want!

Comment by Robbie Edwards on July 16, 2010 at 10:16am

K I posted all the code here: http://wfdn.ca/code.html

Comment by Howard Gordon on July 16, 2010 at 11:07am

Robbie -

Do you have any videos ? I'd love to see the boat in action.

Comment by Ron Jacobs on July 16, 2010 at 12:57pm

Very nice looking work and I'm sure with the advice you can access here you will have a super effective working solution soon.

Developer Comment by Ryan Beall on July 16, 2010 at 2:55pm

RMC! I did a quick exchange there from US Naval Academy. Good to see you guys on here!

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