Slashdot Mirror
Ireland To Host Robotic Sailing Championships
First time accepted submitter dertynan writes The WRSC people are out to make sailors redundant. The World Robotic Sailing Championships (and International Conference) is in Galway, Ireland next week. Around eleven teams are participating in this autonomous sailing event, across a number of courses, over four days.
... so that they can enjoy a Guinness while the boats sail themselves
This doesn't matter that much. Larger yachts sail more or less the same as smaller yachts; the main effect is that all forces are multiplied. For humans this makes a lot of difference: needing winches instead of pulling ropes by hand, being hit by the boom during a jibe changes from unpleasant to lethal, the ability to push off against the wall is greatly diminished, etc. For automatic sailing, however, the main effect will probably be cost rather than difficulty, as none of those factors are really important until material strenght becomes a problem. Smaller boats can even be more difficult to handle since the intertia is smaller compared to the wind forces (mass is cube of size, wind area square), making a smaller boat less stable.