1.

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.( Design and Implementation of a Control System for a

Sailboat Robot)

2. In the first part of this essay will focus on unmanned systems and try defining and

understanding different types of technology and seek to define the meaning of an autonomous

vessel.

It will explain the recent trend, which aims to explore those new ways to consider shipping.

Moreover advantages in comparison to conventional vessels will be considered from a safety,

security, environmental friendliness, cargo efficiency and cost efficiency.

It will analyse related research and development of actors, which are currently researching

and developing the concept of unmanned vessels.

In this respect, unmanned vessel’s characteristics, the way it will operate and its technical

features will be described.

The two main actors, which are currently exploring and developing vessels to be autonomous,
are MUNIN and ROLLS ROYCE. It will analyse the philosophy of the project and the

technical means involved.( Unmanned Vessels : a major challenge

for the next decades)

3. The purpose of this project is to design and build a boat that is operated by a driver and powered

by solar energy. The team will compete against many other universities in the Solar Splash

competition. The competition is comprised of three different races and a technical report. The

three different races are the slalom, the sprint, and the endurance race. The Solar Splash

competition also places multiple constraints on the boats components, such as limiting the size of

the boat, the size of the batteries, and the size of the solar panels. The purpose of these

constraints is to give every university the same chance to succeed, even if the budgets are

different. The underlying objective of this competition is to try and raise awareness for powering

boats through the use of renewable energy. The competition challenges students to explore solar

energy applications for marine vehicles rather than using traditional combustion engines.( Ohio
Northern University Solar Powered Boat)

4. With the increased of fuel energy demand and fear of depletion of the fossil fuel

for year ahead makes most of boat user facing problem with burdened by higher cost of

the fuel. Renewable energy has remarkably the only best solution for this problem.

Hence, these projects proposed to solve the problem by replacing the fuel energy with the

renewable solar power energy. The proposed of the solar power boat which will be

consists of the solar panel (photovoltaic cell) as sunlight collector that act as the power

generator that will be supported by the battery as storage power for the boat and the load

which is dc motor that replace fuel engine. The charging process will be control by the

solar charger controller that uses PWM operation method. Overall system will start by the

sunlight converted to the electricity and then the generated power will be transferred to

the battery. Then only that the load (dc motor) can be operated. Both of these charging

and running the load will be operate together. With this solar power technology, we can
reduce fuel usage. Moreover, these method helps reduce air pollution that produced by

the fuel engine.( THE DEVELOPEMENT OF SOLAR POWER BOAT ENGINE)

5. Autopilots for sailboats are useful assisting tools for sailors. Commer-cially available autopilots are not
able to actuate the sails. This means

that actual autopilots can not control the sails actuation while the boat

keeps the desired course. The idea of this thesis project is to enable

sail actuation for autopilots in order to control the sail angle. Sailboat

autopilots with the ability to actuate the sails are able to control the

sail angle, depending on changing wind directions and velocity.

In this thesis project a sailboat autopilot with integrated sail control

has been implemented. A physical prototype, a sailing model boat,

shows the feasibility of the sail angle control. The electronic devel-opment of this thesis project focuses
on compactness and fail safety.

Special attention has been given to the development of the control

system which is responsible for keeping the desired course and the

sail control. The control system is a combination of learning and feed-back control. Learning is used to
compute the sail angle and feedback

control is used to follow the desired course.

The final experiment shows the feasibility of sailboat autopilots with

sail control. But exposed that speed measuring errors can have an

impact on the accuracy of the system. The tests were done with the

physical prototype on a lake near Halmstad.

It can be concluded that sail control for sailboat autopilots may be

an extension for existing systems on sailboats. Another benefit of this

thesis is, that it can be used as a platform for studying different prob-lems in control. A possible future
step is, to push this thesis project to

a product. Therefore it would be needed to extend the experiments in

order to get more evaluation data and improve the accuracy by using

sensor fusion.( Model based Design of a Sailboat Autopilot)

6. The main goals of the senior design

project are for the student to develop skills and

abilities such as engineering problem solving, crea-tive reasoning, innovation, inventive design, team

work, multidisciplinary work, and self-learning, as

well as using computer software to aid in the design

of innovative prototypes. his article presents the experiences and thework

of engineering students from Tecnolo´gico de

Monterrey (ITESM) during the past two years in

developing the concept and following through the

realization of the solar boat prototype aided

by different computational tools. Participating

mechanical engineering seniors were asked to per-form an assessment of the impact that Project

Oriented Learning Aided by Computer Software

had throughout the process. This qualitative obser-vation by our students is helping faculty in our

department structure future curricula.

7. In this paper, comparison between constant voltage method

and Maximum Power Point Tracking for a solar-powered boat

is presented. The comparison is concluded based on

simulation using Matlab software. The input data of the

simulation is hourly sun irradiance and temperature data on

Surabaya, while the observed output is the output power of the

photovoltaic (PV) panel. The results of the simulation show

that system with MPPT can generate 20 Watthours (Wh)

energy greater than the system with constant voltage in one

day. Based on the required daily energy of the boat, the

system with MPPT need 3 PV panels fewer than the system

with constant voltage control.( Optimizing Solar-Powered Tourist Boat with Converter-Based Maximum

Power Point Tracker)

8. This project is about the design and development of a solar boat that is

powered by an electric motor which gets its supply from photovoltaic (PV) panels

and utilizes solar energy. The PV panels must be mounted and installed on the boat

without compromising riding comfortability. This provides a cost-effective way for

leisure or moving around relatively short distances. To design the solar powered

electric boat, the system is using solar panel, rechargeable battery and electric motor.

A solar collector is connected to the rechargeable battery for collecting solar energy

and converting such energy to electrical power that is delivered to the rechargeable

battery for recharging thereof. A rechargeable batteryis connected to an electric

motor for providing electrical power to drive the motor. Besides that, this solar boat

is developed to minimize and economize the electricity uses for its electric motor and

maximizes the usefulness of solar energy in our life without wasting it and then

extends the system for commercial market. For the conclusion, the solar powered

electric boat that obtains its supply from photovoltaic panels wills functionalusing

solar energy.( SOLAR POWERED ELECTRIC BOAT)

9. This project is a side-project to the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle project and aims to create an au-
tonomously guided, near-unlimited range water craft from mostly off-the-shelf components. Inspiration
for this came from the SeaCharger craft, which was a small team's hobby project to create a solar
powered vessel capable of reaching Hawaii from California (which it eventually succeeded at, and almost
managed to reach New Zealand before suffering rudder failure).
This report covers the process of designing the propulsion, power supply, and control systems for the
boat, including the specifcs of the design and the various dead ends and stalls that occurred. The final

design (as of writing) is a differential-drive three hulled boat made from PVC piping, an aluminum top

frame, and propelled by two powerful brush-less motor based thruster pods. This design has been
tested and can float, propel itself through the water, perform basic navigation between GPS waypoints,
and report its position and status via a 3G modem.

Due to time constraints (from various delays during development), although the craft can operate semi-
autonomously, it still requires work before it can be sent on a multi-day mission (as the 3G telemetry is

not rigorously tested, the control logic needs to be tuned for a sea vessel, and the battery failsafe is not
yet implemented). This report concludes with a list of future work, both the required work for the craft
to be able to run on its own, and optional extensions for data collection and expanded self-monitoring

(Autonomous Solar Powered Boat)

10. A small scale autonomous sail boat has successfully been built and tested. It reached the

goal of sailing a predefined track with no further input from the user, using only the sails

as propulsion.

This intriguing project has many aspects. The boat has been built from scratch and the

mechanical components and their functions are described.

In order to make the boat sail autonomously, electrical currents flow trough the comput-erized control
circuits embedded into the boat. The design and implementation of embedded

computerized control is an important aspect of this thesis.

The physics of sailing are tamed by the means of navigation, control and guidance.

A control allocation scheme, in conjunction with sensor measurements, calibration and

filtering, paves the way for path tracking and high level controls. A complete and optimal

path planner has been suggested. This takes the constraints of sailing and the geographical

constraints into account. The path planner algorithm also accommodate ocean currents

and moving obstacles.

A powerful smart phone user interface is made to manage the boat while it sails through

field tests and thereby generates experiences required for improvements.( Construction and Control of
an
Autonomous Sail Boat)

11. The purpose of this study was to investigate novel methods on an unmanned sailing boat, which
enables it to sail fully autonomously, navigate safely, and perform long-term missions.

The author used robotic sailing boat prototypes for field experiments as his main research method. Two
robotic sailing boats have been developed especially for this purpose. A compact software model

of a sailing boat's behaviour allowed for further evaluation of rout-ing and obstacle avoidance methods
in a computer simulation. The results of real-world experiments and computer simulations are vali-
dated against each other. It has been demonstrated that autonomous boat sailing is possible

by the effective combination of appropriate new and novel techniques that will allow autonomous
sailing boats to create appropriate routes, to react properly on obstacles and to carry out sailing

manoeuvres by controlling rudder and sails. Novel methods for weather routing, collision avoidance,
and autonomous manoeuvre execution have been proposed and successfully demonstrated. The
combination of these techniques in a layered hybrid subsumption architecture make robotic sailing
boats a promising tool for many applications, especially in ocean observation.( Autonomous Sailboat
Navigation)

12. Autonomously navigating surface vessels have a variety of potential applications for ocean

mapping. The use of small vessels for coastal mapping is investigated through development of

hardware and software that form a complete system for survey operations. The hardware is selected to
minimize cost while providing flexibility for installation on different platforms. MOOS-IvP open-source
autonomy software enables independent operation of the vessel and provides for human monitoring.
Custom applications allow the sensors and actuators of the hardware platforms to interface with MOOS-
IvP. An autonomy behavior is developed that replicates current human driven survey acquisition, in

which the boat plans paths automatically to achieve full survey coverage with a swath sonar system.

With initial input of a survey boundary and depths from the onboard sonar system, subsequent

paths are planned to be offset based on the collected data. This behavior is tested in simulation and

field experiments. A model reference adaptive control system for the heading of the vessel is
investigated for improved reliability of vessel operation in a variety of conditions and over the full range
of operation speeds. Simulations tests verify the adaptation of two types of controllers. A new method
for speed control to increase endurance and decrease engine wear is also proposed and simulated.

Together, these developments form an easily configurable system that provides automated
hydrographic survey capability to a vessel with minimal human involvement for optimal performance.

(DEVELOPMENT OF AUTONOMOUS SURFACE VESSELS FOR HYDROGRAPHIC SURVEY APPLICATIONS)