Long term power management in sailing robots

Abstract

This paper describes work on a biologically inspired approach to long term power management in sailing robots. Sailing robots offer the promise of a flexible and low cost ocean observation platform which can either hold station at fixed points or sail transects. Biologically inspired techniques have previously been applied to other power management problems and to miniature sailing robots by ourselves. This work attempted to scale this approach up to a larger (3.65 m long) sailing robot and an in hardware simulation to test if these techniques would scale. For reasons that are not currently clear the techniques which had previously yielded significant improvements in battery life did not appear to make any difference.