New Blog!

Please see http://ubcsailbots.wordpress.com/ for the new UBC SailBot blog!

Kristoffer
UBC SailBot Team

The 5th Annual International Robotic Sailing Competition

Dear Sailbot fans everywhere,

What a great year we've had, and the competition was the perfect ending. We ended up scoring 40.1 points out of 50 available, winning four of the five events by a slim margin. Thunderbird was the fastest boat at the competition, but her speed was not quite enough to beat the US Naval Academy's Gil the Boat, who eked out 40.8 total points by autonomously navigating the 10 km long distance course. It was a fantastic contest, which was extremely competitive through the final event. I hope you'll enjoy the video I put together, and forgive me for my poor camera-man skills - I'm only an engineer after all!

Thank you for the incredible support that you (our friends, families, girlfriends, sponsors, professors and advisors) have given us over the course of this extremely demanding project. It is an experience that I and my team members will never forget.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUBQQoSECmo

Tuning the #1 rig

Here's a recent video of Thunderbird 1 sailing in RC mode with the number one rig up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzVZPKuh7WA

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. We've been seriously busy, what with finishing the school year, finishing our yacht, starting jobs, and programming programming programming!

Thunderbird 1 is sailing extremely well, as you can see in the video above. There is still much work to be done in the area of autonomation, but we have come a long way from the back of the napkin design we had in January! Karl, Don, and I will be in Annapolis less than a month from now, so stay tuned for updates as we close in on the competition.

Gaelen

Building the Number One Rig!

Hello Internet World! I'm super glad that you're here reading about our project, and hope you're as stoked as we are. Over the last week, we've made great progress on the construction of our rigs. On Tuesday, Don and I assembled the number one rig (the largest one for use in the lightest winds). It was really exciting to cut the shrouds and stays to length, connect them, and still find the mast to be just as straight and tall as we had hoped it would be! Seriously, it's amazing the tension that we put into the shrouds - they're like tightropes.

Unfortunately, we are having some serious trouble with the construction of our keel. It is perhaps the most challenging part of the design, weighing the structural demands of waving about a 14 kg lead bulb at the end of a meter-long, centimeter wide spar against the necessity of minimizing the cross section to reduce the drag. The keel and the rudder combined account for almost 80% of the total resistance, so you can understand why we are working so hard to make it as narrow as possible! We are in the process of machining the steel structure at the heart of it's carbon profile, and are dealing with practical problems of warping and odd angles. Once we get it to shape, we will be sandwiching the steel between plates of uni-directional carbon to increase the stiffness and create our foil geometry.

Our boat gets her first taste of the vancouver rain, and is rapidly nearing her launch date!

Please, just ignore the bondo.

This was by far the scariest mast I've ever been asked to climb!!

Our Wind Sensor Lives! (and in only 2 knots of wind, no less)

In other news today, Capt. Gaelen has finally earned his iron ring!!

The Whole Story: What's Going On Here?? (and some more pictures of a beautiful carbon fiber racing sled)

In winter of the year 2011, a team united. The members of the UBC Autonomous Sailboat Team converged upon the engineering lab with one goal in mind: to build a sailboat so fine, so sleek, and so independent that it can literally sail itself - faster than any other miniature autonomous sailing robot in the world! This technology has the potential to counteract the effect of delirium tremens on any tiller, enabling any seaman worth his salt to quaff the customary early morning G&T. Beyond that, it's also probably useful for a host of other things, but let's not beat around the bush. We all know what sailors really want.

Construction is well underway - we've crafted the hull, affixed a variety of rigging, and commenced to fiddle with the rather complicated task of fully automating a hybrid navigation and robotic sail control system. Shockingly enough, we appear to be proceeding on schedule, and anticipate being ready for a miniature bottle of champagne across the bow as early as this month.

And why are we building a 2m long, fully autonomous, GPS-guided, carbon fiber racing yacht? Because we intend to win the 5th Annual International Robotic Sailing Competition. This highly anticipated event will take place at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland on June 13th of this year.

We hope you're excited about our project - we certainly are. Brace yourself, because this is the part where we blur the lines between exciting announcement and brazen solicitation. We are passionate about getting this boat afloat, but we can't do it alone. If you consider yourself to be a member of the wonderfully supportive community of naval architects, marine engineers, and marine hardware manufacturers - or even if you aren't part of the industry, but rather take interest as a sailor or robot enthusiast - we would welcome, value, and appreciate your support in helping a Canadian boat see victory in such celebrated American waters.

As starving students, we are particularly grateful for cash donations to help us defray the expense of this undertaking. We would also be grateful for donations of Air Miles or any 1.2m x 12cm x 12mm blocks of 17-4 precipitation hardenable stainless steel that you happen to have lying around. We only need one, so if you have too many of those cluttering up your shop somewhere, we'd be happy to take one off your hands. Please email us at UBCsailbots@gmail.com to discuss sponsorship benefits, tax-deductable receipts, and any way that you want to help.

And, without any further ado, pictures for the people!

The hull, well sanded and ready for painting

This is the bulk of the muscle on the yacht - the wireless antenae, the rudder, rudder servo, and the double-duty sailwinch.

All that's missing here is a 50 cm carbon pushrod!

Captain Gaelen applies an advanced polymeric surface treatment.

Don testing the patent-protected anti-gravity pump

Looking in the main hatch, we can see the internal structure of the keelbox and mast-step.

Electronic Bits

So a quick update on the brains of this bot. These are most of the bits that will soon become the brains of the sailbot:

And this believe it or not all fits in this box:

IT'S ALIVE!!!!

Pretty anti-climactic I know, but hey it's more than it was doing yesterday!

Topdecks

Our decks are Carbon / Balsa sandwich panels, with only two openings to access the batteries, winch, and navigation systems. The foredeck is V-shaped to shed water, and the aft deck is flat. The key here is simplicity and watertightness. The two sections will be epoxied to the hull.

Byron studies the sheeting system

The aft-deck, with watertight pillbox for antennae (aft of main boom)

The Keelbox and mainsheet post box from below

The antennae pillbox from below

Sailbot Topdeck next to IOM rev. 4 topdecks (look at the difference in structure that another meter requires!)