Directions for Rik Bootsman, Pieter Lobbezoo & Pieter Bron

Over the past 2 project-weeks, various brainstorm sessions, discussions and research have been performed in order to get a clear view on what we want to get out of this project. On the right are the possible directions we've come up with on Monday the 13th of February. We've also performed a brainstorm session that day with random items, to see whether new ideas sprang to mind using these items.

After these brainstorm sessions, it became clear that we want to focus on the Artificial Intelligence, especially autonomous sailing and swarm control. How can we ensure that a fleet of - for instance - 10 vessels can harmoniously work together without crashing each other.

We then continued searching for the optimal building solutions in order to create an easy, yet efficient sailing drone.

Options
- One sail instead of two sails. If you build a gaff rig up front of the drone, you can get proper pulling power without extra control difficulties.
- A canting keel aids the boat to stay at a more horizontal level, ensuring a bigger surface to catch wind in the sails. We might look into this in the future.
- We might want to use a special material for the sails: There exist a very tin fabric of solar panels which can be used as a sail. This way, you have a big surface where energy can be caught to charge the batteries. This is also for in the future.

Plan for now
Our plan is to build a quick and easy sailing drone. We then want to actuate it by using servo's etc., while the final step will be autonomising it. The specs for this boat will be uploaded soon.

1 day prototype: Shifting hull (robot snake)

This is a one day protoype for the Protei project (opensailing.org). Made at the Eindhoven Universitiy of Technology (faculty of Industrial Design).
Movie by: Pieter Bron

The Idea
With this prototype, we wanted to explore the shape changing hull as it was introduced in earlier Protei boats. To do this we decided to build a hull that moves its body like a snake. The hull is made of foam and its movement is controlled by servos attached to an arduino.

Parts list:
Foam
Steel rods
Elastic bands
Servos + wiring
Arduino

Building;
We constructed six equal pieces of foam for the snake’s body, a head and tail where also added.
As shown in the sketch below, the servos are placed in a mirrored pattern.This was done for better weight distribution and it was easier create snake-like behaviour.

With a scalpel, holes for the servos where made;

Then a hole was made in every segment through which an elastic band was fed. This band keeps all segments together. In the back and front the elastic band is held in place by a rod that is pierced through the band.

For the joints, we tried different things;

First we tried making the joints form soft foam, this turned out to be to flexible. The joint being to flexible caused the snake to bend also in different directions as it should.

In version 1 of the prototype (see movie) we used square joints made of the same hard foam as the rest of the body is made of. These joints worked better but made the movement of the snake a lot less smooth. Therefore we chose to use triangular joints (version 2 in the movie).




From this prototype we learned about the mechanical properties a shifting hull needs (the importance of the joints)
If we are going to use this technique in the future we should look into using less servos to make a complete body move (with energy efficiency and simplicity in mind).