Energy Optimization of Automatic Hybrid Sailboat
This work addresses energy efficiency for autonomous surface vehicles in applications like monitoring and research, but it is incremental as it builds on existing hybrid sailboat concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of optimizing electric energy consumption for autonomous hybrid sailboats during ocean cruising by adjusting heading angles when sailing upwind, resulting in up to 23.7% energy savings compared to other conditions.
Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) provide an effective way to actualize applications such as environment monitoring, search and rescue, and scientific researches. However, the conventional ASVs depends overly on the stored energy. Hybrid Sailboat, mainly powered by the wind, can solve this problem by using an auxiliary propulsion system. The electric energy cost of Hybrid Sailboat needs to be optimized to achieve the ocean automatic cruise mission. Based on adjusted setting on sails and rudders, this paper seeks the optimal trajectory for autonomic cruising to reduce the energy cost by changing the heading angle of sailing upwind. The experiment results validate the heading angle accounts for energy cost and the trajectory with the best heading angle saves up to 23.7% than other conditions. Furthermore, the energy-time line can be used to predict the energy cost for long-time sailing.