hi 

i'm rik bootsman a fellow student of sina and working on the same project.

hereby I show the maiden voyage of my sailing drone (at this moment still remotely controlled) 

Because the wind wasn't blowing the week before, I could test it only just before easter and here is the video of the test. You can see the boat tack against the wind and go very fast in what sailers call free reach.
This was still a remote controlled version, but at this moment I can completely control the boat with a remote control but also with my laptop up till 1 km distance. At this moment I'm waiting for a delivery from Farnell with    a gps module and a rotary encoder, this to make the first step to autonomous sailing behavior.

the rotary encoder is a cheap piece of hardware which I want to use to build my own wind direction sensor.
Updates on this of course when the parts are arrived here in the Netherlands.

In the mean time I will work on the interaction between the boat and the user. What are the parameters we can define and how can you visualize and interact with this without really seeing the boat?

also watch my blog www.rikbootsman.com to see the building process!

please comment on it as well!