Design and Implementation of a Control System for a Sailboat Robot

This article discusses a control architecture for autonomous sailboat navigation and also presents a sailboat prototype built for experimental validation of the proposed architecture. The main goal is to allow long endurance autonomous missions, such as ocean monitoring. As the system propulsion relies on wind forces instead of motors, sailboat techniques are introduced and discussed, including the needed sensors, actuators and control laws. Mathematical modeling of the sailboat, as well as control strategies developed using PID and fuzzy controllers to control the sail and the rudder are also presented. Furthermore, we also present a study of the hardware architecture that enables the system overall performance to be increased. The sailboat movement can be planned through predetermined geographical way-points provided by a base station. Simulated and experimental results are presented to validate the control architecture, including tests performed on a lake. Underwater robotics can rely on such a platform by using it as a basis vessel, where autonomous charging of unmanned vehicles could be done or else as a relay surface base station for transmitting data.