This project is subject to a thesis I wrote in 10th grade of my school career. The paper adresses replacing global freight shipment with autonomous sailing vessels. The vessels would not compare to existing cargo freighters in scale. However, because of their autonomy, no crew is needed onboard, so the amount of vessels is independent from available crew.
A while ago I found an old rusty rc sailboat on my attic without any controls or batteries. So I decided to create a control software which works over the internet, enables autonomous sailing and makes this boat as cool and advanced as possible :)
At first I went over a few ordinary systems with radio control, but I noticed very quickly that the problem with those radio controls is that they lose signal after about 50 meters. In my case that may was related to the antennas being located somewhat below the waterline, blocking the signal.
That was a bit disappointing but nevertheless I searched for a better solution and came up with the idea of controlling the boat and its motors with a Raspberrypi, connected to the internet over cellular network with autonomous capabilities. For a deployment on larger lakes or even the ocean a satellite connection certainly would be more reliable than an ordinary cellular connection. A bigger boat could perhaps even use the Starlink internet service enabling masses of realtime data to be transmitted.
You can read all about my findings and research in the thesis.
I am grateful for any type of feedback, inspiration or question regarding CosmicSail.
Feel free to create an issue or mail me to get in touch.