A Rule-Based Approach to Long-Term Routing for Autonomous Sailboats

We present an algorithm for long-term routing of autonomous sailboats with an application to the ASV Roboat. It is based on the A*-algorithm and incorporates changing weather conditions by dynamically adapting the underlying routing graph. We implemented our algorithm in the declarative rule-based programing language Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) [4]. A comparison with existing commercial applications yields considerably shorter computation times for our implementation. It works with real-life wind forecasts, takes individual parameters of the sailboat into account, and provides a graphical user interface.