System Design and Control of a Sail-Based Autonomous Surface Vehicle

Ocean exploration has attracted enormous interest from human-kind for thousands of years. The sailing boat, propelled by wind is a historical invention. But human-involved marine exploration has high risk and low efficiency. This paper presents a new autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) based on retrofitting a trimaran sailing boat. The previous human-based maneuvering interfaces, i.e. sail and rudder control, are motorized by three electric actuators. The ASV acquires signals of wind speed and direction, GPS position, and rolling angle, determine the heading based on various wind direction. Experiments validates the effectiveness of the ASV.