A wind-independent control strategy for autonomous sailboats based on Voronoi diagram

This paper proposes a new control strategy based on Voronoi diagram for autonomous sailboats. This strategy applies the method of Voronoi diagram to decompose the space and uses a lookup table to make the boat sail as planned. The contribution of this paper is that for the first time it proposes an approach to control autonomous sailboats without the data from wind sensors (with data from GPS and compass only). Since the sensor for detecting wind direction can break down at any time, this new strategy, independent of wind direction, is much more reliable. A simulation is proposed to illustrate the principle and the effectiveness of the approach. Two real experiments on buggy and sailboat are also performed for validation.