Link = AUOOSB Project homepageFor those of you interested, I have created a site for the project I have been working on for the last year. I have decided to make the whole thing Open Source so this can be shared and developed with a bunch of IQs and not just my limited one! LOLAnyway i hope you join in for the discussions and the ultimate goal of sailing this thing around the world autonomously.
After doing UAVs for so long, the idea of doing a boat was such a pleasure. You see, when your UAV stops working right, you get to start over (crater). A boat just needs to be towed in and examined and try again. working in the 2D environment really is easier and you don't have to maintain airspeed or worry about stalling or uncontrolable turns or airspace issues. The list goes on and on. Though there are some hurdles to overcome, we have the new website for that. This gives everybody a say in the build. the collective IQ of this project should be huge! This has been exciting and finally getting it off the paper and into the water will really get the juices flowing for everyone involved.
The beauty of a persistant vessel is its ability to stay on station for really long periods of time monitoring ocean temperatures, salinity, PH. What about side scan sonar of huge areas of ocean... accurately and relatively cheaply. treasure hunters could use this to chart magnetometer readings of thousands of square kilometers over a period of months at see without any supervision... at all. Maybe a reef out in the middle of nowhere that needs multiple points measured every day. Ask a marine biologist about the scientific significance of a long term persistance surface science platform that can be remotely retasked. and needs almost no maintenance at all.
I was crew on a 40' Santa Cruz with kevlar sails and asymetrical spinnaker pole. We raced every week for two years. i have worked every station on that boat. i have raced in 25' swells. I do have a little experience here. Why would I bother? It hasn't been done yet thats why!
I know exactly the power requirement from my test bed on the roof that commonly gets 60mph gusts. This is a solar powered vessel. It gets it power from the sun. If the batteries go dead for some reason, it drifts until the power comes back on then it Charlie-Mikes. It will not only run for 5 days in the dark, the solar panels are estimated at an angle pointing strait up will charge all the batteries in less than 4 hours of sun! I based this desgn on a thesis done by a professor at the University California Santa Cruz. I didn't just make this up.
Michael,
a good starting point would be to look at the power requirements and figure out how these will be satisfied in an unmanned vessel. A towed generator is great but only if there is a man around to clean the weed off etc. Wind vanes might get damaged in knock downs etc and nobody is there to repair it - or feather it in strong winds. The power demands could be quite high - a wind vane can help a lot in reducing power requirements - but these are complex creatures too! Will it read the weather forecast?
What scientific research are you proposing? You aren't going to the moon and a 16' boat is hardly going to compete with the many many research vessels presently plying the oceans and eating large sums of money.
Its not clear from your post if you have done much sailing. If you haven't then I recommend you do some whilst the weather is bad. Most of my sailing has been done in the Irish Sea in winds around Bft8 - I am getting tired of it but I think if you want to follow this project through you need that experience to have some idea of what lies ahead in terms of problem solving. If you have done some sailing then I really wonder why you are bothering!
Aah, do you have glass working experience? A friend and I once had a "make your own 2 channel RC 30 inch sailboat" competition, and it was a ton of fun to learn to work w/ glass. I download a program called "Freeship" to design my own hull, but it looks like it has changed some. It was great - let you design it in 3d, then it calculated your ribs and various surfaces for cutting out if you go the hard-chine route.
This will start out as a 8 foot fiberglass hull. We will see where that goes. For littoral cruising that would be pretty good. That size is limited by my building area. Any bigger and it would take over my life and end my marriage! LOL The version for actual circumnavigation will be 16 feet long and will actually be able to carry a lot of payload for scientific research. Thats me hoping for sponsors! LOL . This will include everything that is added over the next year from the AUOOSB site.
Sweet! Sailboats! Now this is a subject I have a bit more familiarity and experience with. Are you looking at a rigid wing sail for simplicity sake? What size hull are you planning, or what existing hull? Open ocean kinda necessitates a fairly large craft (no 30 inch models) but it's not like you _have_ to have a gutted j/24 for a start. (although that would be a "relatively" inexpensive place to start.. if you are looking at that scale atleast!)
Comments
As far as the hull is concerned I am using solidworks and cutting out a mold directly. This will allow me to glass right into the mold.
I know exactly the power requirement from my test bed on the roof that commonly gets 60mph gusts. This is a solar powered vessel. It gets it power from the sun. If the batteries go dead for some reason, it drifts until the power comes back on then it Charlie-Mikes. It will not only run for 5 days in the dark, the solar panels are estimated at an angle pointing strait up will charge all the batteries in less than 4 hours of sun! I based this desgn on a thesis done by a professor at the University California Santa Cruz. I didn't just make this up.
a good starting point would be to look at the power requirements and figure out how these will be satisfied in an unmanned vessel. A towed generator is great but only if there is a man around to clean the weed off etc. Wind vanes might get damaged in knock downs etc and nobody is there to repair it - or feather it in strong winds. The power demands could be quite high - a wind vane can help a lot in reducing power requirements - but these are complex creatures too! Will it read the weather forecast?
What scientific research are you proposing? You aren't going to the moon and a 16' boat is hardly going to compete with the many many research vessels presently plying the oceans and eating large sums of money.
Its not clear from your post if you have done much sailing. If you haven't then I recommend you do some whilst the weather is bad. Most of my sailing has been done in the Irish Sea in winds around Bft8 - I am getting tired of it but I think if you want to follow this project through you need that experience to have some idea of what lies ahead in terms of problem solving. If you have done some sailing then I really wonder why you are bothering!
Good luck,
Mike