Barlavento - Considerations About the Design of an Autonomous Sailboat

Abstract

Persistent monitoring of the ocean is important for several reasons, such as to: better understand the climate and ocean dynamics, improve navigation safety, make a better management of their resources and to prevent and combat abuse to the environment. However persistent monitoring can be extremely expensive. One way of decreasing costs is to use unmanned air, surface or underwater vehicles. However, energy autonomy is a major issue for this type of vehicles. For this reason, autonomous sailboats may be a good solution because they can collect renewable energy from the sea and atmosphere, thus being self-sustainable. The objective of this work is to develop and test an autonomous sailboat capable of performing persistent monitoring of the ocean. The Portuguese Naval Academy has been working on autonomous sailboats since 2010. However, the first autonomous sailboats, that used commercially available hulls, were not resistant enough to bad weather, had little available space for electronics, and were not very efficient. We now decided to design a radically different boat: a very thin and long monohull. We did so using freely available (or very low cost) software, low-cost off-the-shelf components, and simple 3D printers when necessary. This paper describes the creation of the hull using 3D CAD technologies and hydrodynamics simulation.