Autonomous vessels are most likely the future of nautics. A key component of any autonomous vessel is the controller that enables autonomous navigation. The development of such a controller presents many challenges. We develop an autonomous sailboat controller for a small, 2.4 m long robotic sailboat. The development of the controller is divided into two stages. First of all, we take care of the low-level control of the sailboat, where the control of the wings and the control of the rudder are especially important. The adequacy of the control is justified by the results of practical testing. In the second stage, we develop a method for high-level path planning and a framework for the evaluation and analysis of such methods. We compare the proposed method with methods from related works and find that the proposed method requires significantly smaller changes in sailing direction than the other methods and consequently enables sailing with less energy consumption. We also test the final solution with practical testing of autonomous sailing, where we observe the proper functioning of the developed autonomous sailboat controller.
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