Thunderbird 2013, the boat created by UBC’s Sailbot team, won the recent regatta hosted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, held at the California Maritime Academy. This is the second year in a row that the UBC team finished in first place in this incredibly challenging International Robotic Sailing Regatta.
Over a period of five days, the boats in this competition faced 20 knot winds with strong currents and raced in low wind conditions that could becalm a boat that wasn’t handled with real sailing prowess; weather a conventional sailing team might face, but these competitors were sailbots. Sailbots are robotic boats designed to face all of the sailing challenges of navigation, with changing currents, winds, traffic and topography; all done autonomously.
The UBC Sailbot blog tells the exciting story about each of the challenges over the five days of competition. Please consider visiting the site to read the whole story. Perhaps the most breath-taking moments occurred during the final day. The boats faced winds gusting up to 25 knots. At one point Thunderbird 2013 started to take on water from lines being ripped from their rigging. In these heavy winds the Thunderbird 2013 managed to prevent itself from being dragged into shipping lanes with recently added software. It was a real test of the system.
The regatta was held during the International Conference on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering. One of the regatta challenges was to present to a panel of judges attending the conference. The team was well prepared for questions coming from all of the judges’ areas of expertise: mechatronics, naval architecture, and systems engineering.
The expertise needed to create a sailbot is complex; students on the team come from many different disciplines in engineering and science. Team members combine their technical training with their knowledge of sailing, and building know-how to make a winning boat and develop a winning strategy. The UBC team includes: Serena Ramley, Kurtis Harms, Josh Andrews, Arek Sredzki, Jian Lik Ng, Tu Anh Le, Tobias Kreykenbohm, Jamie Lee, Bryan Luu, Kristoffer Vik Hansen, Daniel Kim, and Youssef Basha. The team sends a special thanks to their inspirational Industry Mentor, Mr. Don Martin.
UBC’s Sailbot team is continuing to find new design challenges and will be building a Sailbot to sail the Atlantic in the 2015 Microtransat Challenge.
The SailBot 2014 International Robotic Sailing Regatta is a robotic sailing competition historically held in North America in which teams of university and college students compete. The first event, in 2006, was hosted by Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario and inspired by the success of a senior project at the University of British Columbia to build a robotic sailboat, teams have annually competed throughout the US and Canada. The goal is to create an unmanned sailboat that navigates through a variety of challenges with limited, if any, human control. Students are able to use this friendly competition between schools to apply their engineering knowledge in a multi-disciplinary task that requires mechanical, electrical, and software skill to deal with this highly variable environment.