Open-source Autonomous Sailing Robot

ROS Projects
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We started our open-source (MIT licence) autonomous sailing robot project at University of Southampton. Our ultimate goal is to design a long-persistent ocean observation platform powered by renewable energy. This platform will help us collect data from ocean and have a much better understanding of our ocean environment.

And of course, our autonomous system was build on top of ROS, here is the our source repository:

Here are some picture we took at World Robotics Sailing Championship 2016 at Portugal last year. (We are the champion in our class, by the way :slight_smile: )

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And this year, we are still improving our sailing platform in many ways:

  1. Improve waterproof capability (seawater is a really nightmare to all electronics)
  2. Develop/ integrate new path planning algorithm(s)
  3. Get better sensors (wind sensor, GPS, IMU) for our boat

You are welcome to follow our progress on our blog, and encouraged to join our active discussion on GitHub issue pages.

Last but not least, we are continuously looking sponsors in electronic components, and our trip to World Robotics Sailing Competition 2017 in Spain to defend our champion.

Cheers and happy hacking

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Really cool project, I can see that it is still going on despite this message is quite old.
I love the fact that even the boat CAD files are made with open source software (FreeCAD).

Good luck with the sailing, put some foils on it and you’ll win :slight_smile:

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Indeed, this is a still a on-going project. But this year we will not only participate but also host the World Robotics Sailing Championship (https://www.roboticsailing.org/2018/) at Southampton, U.K.

Yes, we are a group of people really love open source software. :slight_smile:

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