AI on the Ocean: the RoboSail Project

Sailing represents a new area of research within the field of applied AI. This paper gives a global overview of an ongoing broad-scoped research programme, called the RoboSail project (www.robosail.com). Part of this project is the realization of a semiautonomous intelligent pilot and a decision support system, assisting sailors in optimizing sailboat performance. The project encompasses a wide range of various real-world AI problems. In solving these problems, we argue that our approach to symbol grounding by means of using jargon amounts to a significant reduction in the problem’s complexity. The first implementation of this system has been successfully tested by some of the leading sport teams in the world of short-handed sailing.