An Autonomous Sailboat Successfully Crosses Atlantic Ocean (digitaltrends.com) 59
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: The first unmanned and autonomous sailboat has successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean, completing the journey between Newfoundland, Canada, and Ireland. The 1,800 mile journey took two and a half months. It was part of the Microtransat Challenge for robotic boats, and bolsters the possibility of unmanned boats being used for long-haul missions. This could include everything from ocean research to surveillance. "This has never been done before," David Peddie, CEO of Norwegian-based Offshore Sensing AS, which built the vessel, told Digital Trends. "The Sailbuoy [robotic boat] crossed this distance all by itself without incident. The significance of this is that it proves that one can use unmanned surface vehicles to explore the oceans for extended periods and distance. This greatly reduces the cost of exploring the oceans, and therefore enables a much more detailed knowledge of the oceans than is possible using conventional manned technology."
According to Peddie, the journey was surprisingly uneventful when it came to dealing with major challenges. That's a significant departure from the 20 previous unsuccessful efforts made by teams trying to complete the challenge since it started in 2010. "We had to wait a while for the right wind conditions to deploy safely; otherwise, the crossing has been normal with not too much wind and waves," he said. "We had to avoid some oil platforms, but this is not unusual since we test in the North Sea." He also noted that an effort was made to stay away from other ships, since there was a risk that the boat may have been picked up by passing traffic. Sailbuoy ships cost $175,000 each and are powered by on-board solar panels. They send constant GPS data to reveal exactly where they are located.
According to Peddie, the journey was surprisingly uneventful when it came to dealing with major challenges. That's a significant departure from the 20 previous unsuccessful efforts made by teams trying to complete the challenge since it started in 2010. "We had to wait a while for the right wind conditions to deploy safely; otherwise, the crossing has been normal with not too much wind and waves," he said. "We had to avoid some oil platforms, but this is not unusual since we test in the North Sea." He also noted that an effort was made to stay away from other ships, since there was a risk that the boat may have been picked up by passing traffic. Sailbuoy ships cost $175,000 each and are powered by on-board solar panels. They send constant GPS data to reveal exactly where they are located.
Not impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not like an autonomous sailboat has to worry about traffic or pedestrians. Let's see if it can safely dock in a busy Ft Lauderdale marina.
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It's not like an autonomous sailboat has to worry about traffic or pedestrians. Let's see if it can safely dock in a busy Ft Lauderdale marina.
Or speed. 24 miles per day is a very slow boat indeed.
Re:Not impressed (Score:5, Funny)
Or speed. 24 miles per day is a very slow boat indeed.
It was WAY faster than that. This sailboat crossed the Atlantic on Sept 6th [slashdot.org], and now has done it again in only THREE DAYS.
Re:Not impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
Or salvage...if it is unmanned, isn't it fair game for anyone to claim?
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you should be.. (Score:2)
Because somehow they managed to make these toys cost $175k each.
I can only assume that they are planning to get the government on the hook somehow, because even the cartels are likely to baulk at that price.
I mean really, $175k each.. is there ANY conceivable use that would not make that price just a joke?
Of course it is noy even distantly TRUE, but thats the story they are trying to spin.. so...
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I mean really, $175k each..
That is likely 95% NRE. So one boat costs $175k, and each additional boat costs $5k.
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Rich people who can't be assed to learn how to sail but want to brag about having a sailing boat, too?
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Sailing is WAY more complicated than putting rudders and sails at the proper position.
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It's not like an autonomous sailboat has to worry about traffic or pedestrians.
That's only because for some strange reason it is still frowned upon to dump traffic and pedestrians into the middle of the Atlantic.
But never fear, I can only presume our government is currently hard at work trying to remove those regulations, as clearly additional testing is needed. For science!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously...you're not a golfer.
As an IT professional, amateur roboticist, and sailor living aboard for some time, I'm impressed. Mooring in a busy port is a completely different set of skills. I've thought about ways to automate this and that, even the whole thing driving itself, and it's not easy. It's certainly not cheap. Not saying I have $175k to throw at a prototype that I'm going to send off across the Atlantic without me being onboard because I'm that hardcore a scientist, but I'm cognizant of how i
Use case (Score:3)
re-read the summary.
The potential use case aren't sailing huge container ships around. (For that, we already have human, and given that the human crew's is a tiny rounding error on the scale of the money involved in such maritime transportations, nobody is in a hurry to replace those soon. - That's partially the reason why there is so few roboats development).
The potential use case mentioned in the summary is ocean research to surveillance.
i.e.: use cases where getting in and out of the port isn't important
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No, it just has to worry about wind, waves, navigation, storms, icebergs, and all of the ways the open ocean tries to kill you.
Sailing across an ocean is a non-trivial thing even with a skilled crew, and it takes literally years of experience to become an open water yachtsman.
This is a lot more impressive than armchair sailors on Slashdot realize.
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AC wrote :
it just has to worry about wind, waves, navigation, storms, icebergs, and all of the ways the open ocean tries to kill you .... This is a lot more impressive than armchair sailors on Slashdot realize.
No it isn't all that impressive, and I have been a professional sailor. TFA says that they waited until the wind and waves were favourable. It says :-
That's a significant departure from the 20 previous unsuccessful efforts made by teams.... "We had to wait a while for the right wind conditions to deploy safely; otherwise, the crossing has been normal with not too much wind and waves"
Sounds like I could have made it across on a pedalo at the time, and that some of the previous 20 attempts did meet some real wind and waves.
Hard to believe... (Score:4, Interesting)
.... that the drug cartels haven't been doing this for years now. It can't possibly be that hard, especially with the amount of funding they can bring to bear.
Re:Hard to believe... (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile they build submarines :D
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I was thinking the same thing. If I had to fathom a guess it is probably why they have not been interdicting submersibles in recent years. I'd imagine now they are using much smaller remote controlled submersibles. When interdiction happens it's probably of vessels that don't have any drugs on board and so nothing is found. Rather those vessels are probably following closely in front of or behind the drugs instead. It's actually a really great idea and wonder how much of that is already going on in terms of
Re:Hard to believe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's because a sailboat is not ideal. If it has any kind of cargo capacity it's going to stick out on radar and take a long time to get where it's going to go.
Drug dealers have used robotic cigarette boats, and even built narco-submarines.
Maybe for smuggling fentanyl, which on a per gram basis with worth nearly ten thousand times as much as cocaine.
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Well, in the future a wall will clearly stop all these drones flying in. Problem solved.
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Space Force plans to expand the space elevator concept into a space wall. It'll enclose the USA and provide cheap access to orbital weapons platforms at the same time. (The outward-facing sides of the wall will be covered in oil to make sure they're slippery enough to not be climbable by foreign space agencies / drug smugglers.)
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As I understand it, the human cost to smuggling is a small rounding error.. Why risk losing a shipment, or having the DEA crack the software, if you don't have to.
And now the jokes begin... (Score:1)
"I Rowboat"
Re: (Score:1)
I posted the link to the Onion editorial of the same name the last time they posted it but because Slashdot is lazy about submissions that this has shown up twice, I'm too lazy to paste it in again.
Is this a different boat... (Score:4, Interesting)
... than this? https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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Is this a different boat... ... than this?
No. Why do you ask?
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Are We Running Out of Stories? (Score:4, Informative)
msmash posted a story about this same boat and its voyage [slashdot.org] three days ago. Come on guys get your act together! Quit posting the same stuff over and over.
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msmash posted a story about this same boat and its voyage three days ago.
Hey now, that's a significant improvement in the editor AI from a decade or two ago, once per three days over three to four times a day.
As the editors are all 100kloc perl programs, that's pretty fantastic all things considered!
Saildrone has been doing more than this for years. (Score:1)
Saildrone have been operating for the last 5 years, are far faster on average, have already clocked up the equivalent of 8x round the world and in fact will send a couple of drones around the world this year, and are in the process of scaling up hugely
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/this-man-is-building-an-armada-of-saildrones-to-conquer-the-ocean
Re: Saildrone has been doing more than this for ye (Score:1)
A Robotic Cheered (Score:2)
these guys did it so it cant be that hard. (Score:1)
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/what-can-28000-rubber-duckies-lost-at-sea-teach-us-about
By most measures, its still a failure (Score:3)
Toy Boats? $175k? (Score:2)
Why do these toy boats (from the videos it's obvious that they are barely a couple of feet long) cost anywhere close to $175000. WTF?
Did it cross it again already? (Score:2)
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Unmanned but not autonomous (Score:1)
It competed in the "unmanned" category, which allows communications that can change the course of the boat.