Construction and Control of an Autonomous Sail Boat

:A small scale autonomous sail boat has successfully been designed, built and tested. It is capable of sailing a feasible predefined track with no further input from the user, using only the sails as propulsion.The physics of sailing are tamed by the means of navigation, control and guidance. The boat has been equipped with flexible and powerful hardware for computerized control. This hardware gathers measurements, runs actuators and execute both high and low level control algorithms. A control allocation scheme for the sail boat has been proposed. The scheme ensurers progress in all feasible points of sail and has proved efficient in tests. A controller uses the scheme to close the heading loop and in turn the position loop is closed by a waypoint tracker.