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An Autonomous Sailboat Successfully Crosses Atlantic Ocean (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: The first unmanned and autonomous sailboat has successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean, completing the journey between Newfoundland, Canada, and Ireland. The 1,800 mile journey took two and a half months. It was part of the Microtransat Challenge for robotic boats, and bolsters the possibility of unmanned boats being used for long-haul missions. This could include everything from ocean research to surveillance. "This has never been done before," David Peddie, CEO of Norwegian-based Offshore Sensing AS, which built the vessel, told Digital Trends. "The Sailbuoy [robotic boat] crossed this distance all by itself without incident. The significance of this is that it proves that one can use unmanned surface vehicles to explore the oceans for extended periods and distance. This greatly reduces the cost of exploring the oceans, and therefore enables a much more detailed knowledge of the oceans than is possible using conventional manned technology."
According to Peddie, the journey was surprisingly uneventful when it came to dealing with major challenges. That's a significant departure from the 20 previous unsuccessful efforts made by teams trying to complete the challenge since it started in 2010. "We had to wait a while for the right wind conditions to deploy safely; otherwise, the crossing has been normal with not too much wind and waves," he said. "We had to avoid some oil platforms, but this is not unusual since we test in the North Sea." He also noted that an effort was made to stay away from other ships, since there was a risk that the boat may have been picked up by passing traffic. Sailbuoy ships cost $175,000 each and are powered by on-board solar panels. They send constant GPS data to reveal exactly where they are located.
According to Peddie, the journey was surprisingly uneventful when it came to dealing with major challenges. That's a significant departure from the 20 previous unsuccessful efforts made by teams trying to complete the challenge since it started in 2010. "We had to wait a while for the right wind conditions to deploy safely; otherwise, the crossing has been normal with not too much wind and waves," he said. "We had to avoid some oil platforms, but this is not unusual since we test in the North Sea." He also noted that an effort was made to stay away from other ships, since there was a risk that the boat may have been picked up by passing traffic. Sailbuoy ships cost $175,000 each and are powered by on-board solar panels. They send constant GPS data to reveal exactly where they are located.
It's not like an autonomous sailboat has to worry about traffic or pedestrians. Let's see if it can safely dock in a busy Ft Lauderdale marina.
You are welcome on my lawn.
.... that the drug cartels haven't been doing this for years now. It can't possibly be that hard, especially with the amount of funding they can bring to bear.
... than this? https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
msmash posted a story about this same boat and its voyage three days ago. Come on guys get your act together! Quit posting the same stuff over and over.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Sure it got where it was supposed to go--but it cost $175K, was only ~7 feet long, only averaged ~1 mph, and--last but not least--it has nowhere for busty vixens to tan their ta-tas and sip wine coolers.
re-read the summary.
The potential use case aren't sailing huge container ships around. (For that, we already have human, and given that the human crew's is a tiny rounding error on the scale of the money involved in such maritime transportations, nobody is in a hurry to replace those soon. - That's partially the reason why there is so few roboats development).
The potential use case mentioned in the summary is ocean research to surveillance.
i.e.: use cases where getting in and out of the port isn't important (you might as well drop such a research platform in the ocean from a mothership), but where successfully surviving and sailing around the ocean for extended amount of time is important. (but isn't currently researched a lot, due to lack of strong economic incentive mentionned above).
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