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Trans-Atlantic Robots
An anonymous reader writes "In the summer of 2008, teams from a host of countries will compete in The Microtransat Challenge with the hope of gaining the honor of having built the first autonomous sailboat to cross the Atlantic. The results of Microtransat 2007, a smaller scale preliminary race, were recently announced. The winner was the team from Austria; team RoBoat, for having completed 24 hours of autonomous sailing. I am strongly considering joining this competition before the year is out, and would appreciate any insight from the Slashdot community. The boats can be up to 4 meters in length, and therefore capable of carrying a full-sized onboard computer (operating system of your choice). Time is limited however, so I would like to avoid as many hardware issues as possible and get straight to the difficult problem of writing the AI. So how would you design a seamless interface between sensors and actuators to the high-level code?"
While you do your project, I would urge you to post your solutions in great detail to push lots of the patentable material into the realm of prior art.
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My perception is all societies will need zero carbon emitting low energy consumption autonomous vehicles. Your sailboat is exactly the vehicle needed for the low carbon footprint future.
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I have been thinking about autonomous vehicles operating in the 1 to 4 mile per hour speed range. These vehicles will need a vehicle to vehicle communication process.
Someone recommended I review the one-laptop-per-child project. The OLPC laptop has ad-hoc peer to peer wireless networking built in. The laptop has a waterproof keyboard too.
Your sailboat should have the ability to communicate with nearby boats, right? Avoid collision, exchange wind and wave data, describe location and direction of travel, receive collision warnings, dodge oncoming tankers, heave to when being boarded at the end of the trip. For initial development, you will want a SSH link to a nearby boat and you will want to see what your boat is using as navigation inputs and rudder and sail angle control outputs.
Slow moving trucks going nose-to-tail down a highway will need a similar vocabulary to pass trip and safety information from vehicle to vehicle.
All this top level stuff should be available in a free software format. I mean should in the sense that the message language must be open. And second should in the sense that part of the problem has been addressed already. Perhaps reviewing kugle.com source code research engine might help you find source code. Perhaps there is a DARPA autonomous vehicle team that has written a vehicle to vehicle message exchange language.
How about a mast-top high brightness LED navigation light that broadcasts high speed data to other ships nearby? Sending out UDP packets in light flashes? Route the OLPC ad-hoc networking data stream up to an led and photo-transistor detector device.