Hello all!
I have been a member of the forums for a while and I firstly would like to thank all of the other members for their help in answering questions of other users. I have used this as a very valuable resource in my project. I want to also apologise for "ghosting" and not posting myself until now.
Anyway! I thought I would let you all know of a project I am undertaking at the University of Nottingham which we started last October.
A group of 3 other students and I have been developing an autonomous sailboat, the aim of this project is to send the boat across the Atlantic ocean to complete the Microtransat and Cunard transatlantic challenges.
We continued the project from a team of students who started last year and designed the hull of the boat and some of the control systems.
Our system will:
- Take inputs from GPS, Compass and a wind vane to get location, bearing and wind direction
- Use these inputs to generate a direction for the boat to travel from a pre-programmed route
- Using a gear system and servo motors, move the position of the sail and the rudder in order to direct the boat.
I have been designing the control systems with one other member and the final two members have been creating the mechanical gear systems.
The computer unit for the system is an APM 2.6 with an attached 3DR module (compass and GPS).
We are powering two 6V lead acid batteries (connected in series to get 12V) with a solar panel. These batteries are connected to a power module (which connects to the APM), the power is then fed to an H-bridge and then, servo motors.
We have disassembled a small servo motor to get access to the board. It gives an output to a motor and has closed loop feedback with a potentiometer. We are removing the potentiometer and attaching our own and the motor inputs are being wired to the previously mentioned H-bridge. Finally, the two outputs from the H-bridge are connected to larger servo motors which will move the sail and rudder systems.
I am sure I have left out a lot of detail, if anyone has any questions, I would be very happy to answer!
Replies
Nice! I'm not alone in this. I have a sailing vessel of about a one meter length to witch I programmed a Arduino UNO. The code works fine but need some fine adjustments for steering.
I'm a skilled sailor and work as a automation programmer. So I thought I would bring my two interests together. Therefore I started my project of a autonomous sailing boat.
My hardware is:
Boat (of course)
Arduino UNO.
AS5040 as wind vane.
Serial GPS.
LSM303D tilt compensated compass.
Two RC-servos (sheet and rudder).
I just bought a APM2.x with GPS that I will try to use in the boat. Mostly because I want to be able to use Mission Planner. My intention is to modify the code so it can handle upwind conditions with information from the wind vane.
If you run into problems with the dissected servo, try the controllers from Dimension Engineering - their Kangaroo + a Sabertooth gives you programmable large servo functionality. I'm not affiliated with them, I've just used their gear.
Sounds like an interesting project, good luck! Also, please post pictures. :)
Thank you! Yes I will upload some photos :)
Sounds great, also looking forward to pictures.
Fantastic. Would love to see some photos!
If you integrate the sailboat into ardupilot we would love to incorporate it into the main source repository. Is your code on github?
Keep us posted of your progress!
Thanks, Grant
Hi Grant, to code the system I am using the example files from ardupilot and adding some of my own text, however I have only started learning C/C++ for this project. I will definitely share my code when it is complete, but I expect it will be very specific to our project and probably not very efficient!
Jonathan, What are you using for a wind vane?
Regards,
David R. Boulanger
Hi David. We initially planned on buying one, however we found they were far too expensive for our budget of £500 so now we are making our own from a potentiometer connected to a 3D printed vane