Design and Control of A Hybrid Sailboat for Enhanced Tacking Maneuver
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for sailing robots used in ocean missions like marine exploration, though it is incremental as it builds on existing sailboat designs with added propulsion.
The paper tackled the problem of sailboats' low mobility and high failure rate during tacking maneuvers in complex wind fields by designing a hybrid sailboat with electric propellers and a control system, resulting in an average speed increase of approximately 10% and enhanced success rate.
Sailing robots provide a low-cost solution to conduct the ocean missions such as marine exploration, pollution detection, and border surveillance, etc. However, compared with other propeller-driven surface vessels, sailboat suffers in complex marine wind field due to its low mobility. Especially in tacking, sailboats are required to head upwind, and need to make a zig-zag path. In this trajectory, a series of turnings, which will cross the challenging no-go zone, place significant challenge as it will reduce speed greatly and consequently result in unsuccessful turning. This paper presents a hybrid sailboat design to solve this issue. Electric propellers and control system are added to a model sailboat. We have further designed the control strategy and tuned the parameters (PWM-time) experimentally. Finally, the system and control can complete the tacking maneuver with average speed approximately 10% higher and enhanced success rate, though the sailboat weight is much heavier.