Robot Boat Sails Into History By Finishing Atlantic Crossing (apnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: For the first time an autonomous sailing robot has completed the Microtransat Challenge by crossing the Atlantic from Newfoundland, Canada to Ireland. The Microtransat has been running since 2010 and has seen 23 previous entries all fail to make it across. The successful boat, SB Met was built by the Norwegian company Offshore Sensing AS and is only 2 metres (6.5 ft) long. It completed the crossing on August 26th, 79 days and 5000 km (3100 miles) of sailing after departing Newfoundland on June 7th. Further reading: A Fleet of Sailing Robots Sets Out To Quantify the Oceans.

Comments

Re:Hard to understand why this would be difficult

[hey!]

There really aren't a lot of obstacles to deal with. Just point the boat and go.

I imagine that's true, if you have an effectively unlimited energy, but the terms of this contest is to build a vehicle less than eight feet long that can cross the Atlantic.

That's not a lot of room to stuff with batteries or diesel fuel, or to cover with solar panels. And that's the whole point. If you could make the vehicle a hundred feet long, this challenge would be expensive, but easy. By making the boat tiny, you make the challenge affordable, but tough.

The race has two divisions, sail powered and unlimited, but it's hard to see what they had in mind for propulsion by having an unlimited division. Possibly some seawater-replenished fuel cell.