Robotic sailboats

Environmental challenges are making ocean and atmospheric observation applications particularly visible, with one of the key issues being to understand the fine interactions between the sea and the atmosphere. Among the many measurement methods used by scientists, autonomous sailboats are in full expansion. The use of wind as a means of propulsion makes it possible to envisage very long missions over very great distances. Compared with traditional measuring equipment (ships, fixed buoys, etc.), autonomous sailing boats also have the advantage of combining great agility and reconfigurability with a low-cost design. Finally, while autonomous sailing vessels were initially designed for oceanographic observation as an improvement on passive drifting buoys, they can also offer opportunities and be associated with innovative services. For example, they are particularly well-suited to area surveillance operations, communication relay applications between ships, or between submarine and airborne segments, and so on.

The first section of this article will give a general introduction to autonomous sailboats through their possible applications and examples of existing robots. This will be followed by a more detailed description of the specific features of a sailboat robot and its components. In the third section, kinematic and dynamic modeling will be presented, to help with prototype sizing and simulation, while the final section will focus on the control of an autonomous sailboat robot.