Autonomous Marine Robot of Eolic Propulsion

At the present time, the research in the area of clean energy is one of the most relevant issues, which together with the recent advances in the field of marine robotics, presents a promising subject and an excellent experimental field for development of new technologies to be used on another scale for freight transportation with low costs and pollution levels. Motivated by this fact, this paper addresses the study and development of a robotic sailboat, which should be capable to execute the complex process of sailing autonomously. A detailed description of the sailboat, its layout system, and its mathematical model composed by the kinematics, dynamics and applied forces and moments are presented. After the derivation of the model of the applied forces and moments and its nonlinear dynamic equations of motion, simulation results are provided to illustrate the behavior of the sailboat. In particular, the velocity's polar prediction (VPP) diagram that represents the maximum speed that the sailboat can reach for each wind speed and direction is computed. Based on the VPP, we present a control strategy that exploiting the tack and jibe maneuvers and actuating only on the sail and rudder orientations allows the sailboat to make progress in any given direction (on a zoom out scale) independent of the wind direction. Simulation results that illustrate the proposed control strategy are presented and discussed.