I came a few months ago to talk about VRC-A class, a class for autonomous sailing boats (without crew).
I will come to you today to talk about OpenSailor, the first sailing boat that will meet the VRC-A class measurement rules.
OpenSailor is an autonomous sailing boat - unmanned - capable of covering several hundred nautical miles in complete autonomy (nautical and energetic) ... This is a monohull of slightly more than three meters which has forms similar to an Open 60. Because we are enthusiasts with a limited budget, we build it from a canoe that we have cut and constrained.
From the energy viewpoint, OpenSailor will carry the equivalent of 200 Ah battery wich will be refilled by wind and solar energy.
OpenSailor will carry everything needed to be aware of its environment (wind,atmospheric pressure, wave,...), position (GPS) and its physical behavior (speed, drift, heel, trim,...). It will be able to adapt to weather conditions (sail trim, reefing, cap,...) to go to a point defined in advance.
The yacht is currently under design and construction, and all the design documents (available under a CC: BY-NC-SA license) will be on the site www.open-sailor.com progressively following our steps forward!
We are at the beginning of the project, but here's a first provisional schedule:
- July 2012: first navigation in "radio controlled" mode on Lake Geneva
- July 2013: first autonomous navigation, probably St Malo -> Jersey -> St Malo or Les Sables d'Olonne -> Douarnenez
Sincerely yours.
Pierre
Comments
Hi and thanks to all!
@Philippe : I'm not from Switzerland but from north of France (near Belgium), but yes, i know their website. Very impressive project, but I don't know what they do for the last year…
@Troy : Have you some photos or tips to share on your project ? I've seen nothing in your profile and i'm very interested…
Pierre
Thanks to all of you for your interest...
@William: on micro-transat, there are two important points. The first is the measurement rules: the VRC-A class is a "box rule" that is natively designed to be compatible with the micro-transat one, there is no problem on that side. The second point concerns the teams that can participate to the micro-transat. There is, for now, one problem: the micro-transat is opened only to teams of students (universities, engineering schools,...). The OpenSailor team is not composed of students :-(. Maybe they change the rules if enough teams are in our case ...
@Mike : sorry for that :-(
@Kevin : Our idea is to share everything we do. This is also why we publish the documentation under a Creative Commons license. So you are welcome on our site to explore our documentation, depending on how we move forward, what we do and how we do it. You are also welcome to participate, through your comments if any ...
Even if my English is far from excellent;-) I'll try to post here regularly, the progress of our discussions and work ...
Pierre
Kevin
Amazing project!
Perhaps you could include an AIS system and just declare it as an autonomous vessel.
Do you have any thoughts on the Microtransat Challange? (www.microtransat.org)
Thanks so much for sharing this,
Will
Hi!
You're right, Marc. It's a potential problem we are conscious of... The VRC-A class provides a number of things to ensure that our boats are considered, in the sight of international law, as a marine beacon (a kind of buoy) which is not subject to the code of the navigation nor the COLREGS... But it is a subject that will certainly further at some point...
Thank you very much for your interest in our project!
Pierre
Hi Pierre,
great effort!
I think you already did this but just as a reminder: check international law about cruising on open oceans...
There was a quite ambitious project in germany few years ago where a university built a big autonomous sailbot. They had invested millions when they realized the government (wich is responsible in the end for a boat originating from it) would not let them go. So their plan of cruising around the world disapeared as most information about it.
Marc