This work presents a small and affordable autonomous sailboat platform designed to be transported and operated by one or two people without any special means. The sailboat is based on a RC One Meter class vessel equipped with a low power 8-bit microcontroller board and a set of navigation sensors (compass, GPS, wind vane, ...) and a 868 MHz RF module.It has been designed to serve as a low cost replicable testbed platform for research in autonomous sailing. The embedded control system makes the sailboat completely autonomous to sail a route determined as a sequence of waypoints, adapting its sailing point dynamically to wind conditions. The control system is completed with an off-board base station that permits to monitor and control the boat or defining a new route. The system is characterized by its long autonomy and robustness in case of communication failures.
This paper presents an ongoing work aimed at the development of a multithreaded open source sailboat controller based on cheap Arduino-compatible hardware and ChibiOS/RT, a small and agile real-time operating system.The results achieved so far prove that this approach, that relies intensively on the programming resources provided by the real-time multithreaded operating system has produced a more stable, easy to modify and predictable controller, all of them valuable characteristics in the context of a sailboat and particularly in the case of competition environments..
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