Thanks DIYDrones community! We at the Royal Military College of Canada used the Ardupilot software and ground station as a basis for programming our 2m autonomous wing-sailed trimaran. This made our lives much easier while building and programming the boat during the 3 month time frame before it competed in Sailbot 2010 http://sailbot.ca.
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Anybody has the source code, i want to build a similar boat.
Thanks.
Hi Mark!
Glad to hear some more people are trying auto sailing, I'm really hoping to get back into path planning for sailboats in the next few months.
I haven't published any official code but a long time ago I did have a link to the very customized code I had for the specific hardware on my wing-sail boat. It wouldn't work on an Ardupilot , but you might be interested in the path planning for upwind sailing found in the code. I'll put a copy here. Just be warned, I wrote this when I was learning to program. There is a little explanation in this presentation and code with undocumented variables here: http://high-phi.com/sailbot/navrules.pdf. v=velocity, b= boat, w=wind, theta= angle.
If I were you I wouldn't use any of my stuff. I would get your boat on the water with Ardu-rover or arduboat (if there still is one) and just give it waypoints that you know it can get to and that aren't too far up wind for it to sail. This way you can test and tune your rudder PID controller. Hook the sail sheets up to the throttle and just set high throttle (sheet in).
Once you get that working you can make yourself a simple wind direction instrument with an absolute encoder or continuously rotating potentiometer with a weather vane. Then see if you can add your own code to read that in to the system. Then as a last step, you could either modify the path following controller to account for upwind sailing or you could have your code insert waypoints which will get the boat upwind to its target. I'm pretty sure Ardupilot will let you put in your own scripts to set waypoints and such but I haven't looked into this myself and I am flying OpenPilot these days.
Good luck and keep us posted on how things go.
COOL I like it
COOL I like it
I want to send an autonomous boat from Halifax to Bermuda....
That is exactly how I would do it Troy. I have always wanted to do autonomous sailing 'right'. I've been thinking about buying a nice 1-2m conventional sailboat and reworking some code. Sailing seems to be a considerably complex path planning problem if you are shooting for an optimal solution. This would be quite interesting to work on. I can already see my spare time this summer disappearing.
Robbie, I don't think there's any ArduBoat software per se. I was assuming it was just the ArduRover software, but with different usage instructions for boats.
I would love to help out but I am afraid I have never actually used the ArduBoat software.
Glad to see the interest in autonomous boats. If any of you would like to help set up an ArduBoat manual (next to the Plane, Copter and Rover manuals), we'd be glad to handle the backend stuff and host it. Just let me know and I'll put you in touch with the editorial team.
Hey Brian,
All this was written 3 years ago. By the time we got it working it had turned into quite a hack-job to get things working. We also had an airfoil tail instead of a sheet line. We later switched that to a worm gear system to turn the sail. All that is piled on the code.
It is available here: http://high-phi.com/BOAT_MAIN_G4_2.rar
What you really may be interested in though is the BOAT_NAV page which is summed up here: http://high-phi.com/picstrat.pdf. It may not be state of the art robotics but those if statements have been quite reliable. Please keep us posted on your design.
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