AUTOSAIL MDH

AutoSail is a student project where twelve M.Sc.Eng students will develop an autonomous sailing boat with the goal to compete in WRSC 2021.

Who are we?

We are twelve Master of Science in Engineering students from Mälardalens University in Västerås, Sweden. We are working on our final project of our last year at the Robotics, Dependable systems and Embedded systems programs. An autonomous sailing boat will be developed and the goal is to compete in WRSC(World Robotic Sailing Championships) in 2021.

The Robotics program covers robotics applied in different fields with focus on the Sense-Plan-Act methodology. The courses of the program include everything from mechanics and electronics to signal processing and artificial intelligence with many of the courses being practical. The last year the students knowledge which includes building and controlling robots are used in the final project, provided either by a company or by Mälardalen university itself.

This project is provided by Mikael Ekström, Professor in robotics at Mälardalen university, and supported by STINT. The purpose of this project is to enter the WRSC, which is a competition for autonomous sailboats, and give us students an opportunity to apply our knowledge within robotics and autonomous vehicles on a real platform with an explicit goal. The goal is to develop an autonomus sailing boat. The boat is to be powered by solar cells and should be able to plan and follow the best available course from given way point data. To compete in the WRSC the boat must also be able to detect, localise and avoid obstacles.

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EVERYTHING IS OPENSOURCE

As the competition rules for the WRSC states, everything needs to be open-source. Follow the link below take part of everything the team has made, from software to CAD-models.

GitHub

What we use

Some "components/softwares/hardwares" used in this project.

Python

A friendly and easy to use programming language that speeds up the development time and effectively integrate the system

ROS

A middleware with tools and libraries to help the development of a robot application

Github

GitHub is a hosting platform for developers integrated with the version control system Git. It has tools such as reviewing code, manage projects, and much more!

Linux

A lightweight open-source operating system which are commonly used in single-board computers

GNSS

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is a name for all the satellite systems, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou. It is used to determine the position of the vessel by using signal from satellites

Wind vane

A wind vane is a sensor that reads the direction of the wind. This is necessary to properly adjust the sails of the vessel

Vision

Vision capabilities are implemented to gather information about the environment, to create obstacle avoidance, and to read a AprilTag

Solar energy

Making use of solar power makes the vessel sufficient giving it long voyage capability

MapViz

MapViz is a tool used to visualize 2d data. It is ROS-based making it easily integrable into our system

Odroid

A powerful single board computer with an ARM processor that is able to run operating system such as linux and android

Want to join the adventure?

Contribute to the project by sharing your ideas and experiences with the team.

Contact us!

About us

  • 143

    Swedish-fika pauses
    • 0

      Days since the last accident
      • 734

        Rows of Code
        • 1489

          Hours worked