Improving Instrumentation Support and Control Strategies for Autonomous Sailboats in a Regatta Contest

This paper presents a controller architecture targeted for autonomous sailing of a small yacht, having in mind its control within a regatta contest. The controller architecture considers a three layer hierarchical decomposition, where the bottom layer takes care of the low level control of the sail and the rudder, based on the usage of a fuzzy controller, while the middle one selects the adequate navigation strategy (avoiding no-go zone), and the top layer is responsible for the definition of the regatta sequence of intermediate and final goals. A model-based development strategy is used, relying as much as possible on automatic code generation from models. Initial electronic instrumentation support comes from a compass, a GPS and a wind vane, but current developments include addition of an anemometer (providing wind speed and direction), as well as the introduction of virtual sensors obtained from computation of sensor data (as velocity obtained from GPS). A framework allowing the emulation of the different electronic instrumentation components support a complete offline validation of the controller, in a laboratory environment.