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Autonomous sailing with Ardupilot

Posted by Robbie Edwards on July 15, 2010 at 7:00pm


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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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Comments

  • Aevi Goth June 12, 2013 at 7:38pm

    I have a sail boat project going.... I have installed a small brusless motor to a basic 2m sail boat. The idea is to have the boat travel from way point to waypoint. I'd like to use it for FPV sailing :) the idea incorporates a brusless gimble to stabilize the cam.... I'd be very interested in the code you have there :)

    I'd like to be able to use the sail when possible, and the motor as a back up.. . any ideas?

  • Developer
    Ryan Beall July 16, 2010 at 2:55pm
    RMC! I did a quick exchange there from US Naval Academy. Good to see you guys on here!
  • Ron Jacobs 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.
  • Robbie Edwards July 16, 2010 at 10:16am
    K I posted all the code here: http://wfdn.ca/code.html
  • Developer
    Jason Short July 16, 2010 at 9:23am
    I'll have a look at the code if you want!
  • Robbie Edwards July 16, 2010 at 9:05am
    hyperlink didn't work. www.wfdn.ca
  • Robbie Edwards 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.
  • bigkahuna July 16, 2010 at 1:57am
    Very cool project and a very nice looking boat!
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson 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)
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