Abstract
Ocean exploration and monitoring with autonomous platforms can provide researchers and decision makers with valuable data, trends and insights into the largest ecosystem on Earth. Regardless of the recognition of the importance of such platforms in this scenario, their design and development remains an open challenge. In particular, energy efficiency, control and robustness are major concerns with implications in terms of autonomy and sustainability. Wingsails allow autonomous boats to navigate with increased autonomy, due to lower power consumption, and greater robustness, due to simpler control. Within the scope of a project that addresses the design, development and deployment of a rigid wing autonomous sailboat to perform long term missions in the ocean, this paper summarises the general principles for airfoil selection and wingsail design in robotic sailing, and are given some insights on how these aspects influence the autonomous sailboat being developed by the authors.
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Funding
This work was partially financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), within project UID/EEA/50014/2019.
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Silva, M.F., Malheiro, B., Guedes, P., Ferreira, P. (2020). Airfoil Selection and Wingsail Design for an Autonomous Sailboat. In: Silva, M., Luís Lima, J., Reis, L., Sanfeliu, A., Tardioli, D. (eds) Robot 2019: Fourth Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1092. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35990-4_25
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