Project Presentation

A short presentation of robokite

Introduction

This project is intended to provide:

• general documentation about kites (design, modeling, control, applications)
• documentation of the designs for the hardware of kite control systems
• source code of a kite control system
• script to download dependencies

History

Project was started by Baptiste LABAT in 2013, ship control engineer who took a one year leave entrepreneurship to launch this project. The long term project was the traction of huge ships by wind force to save fuel consumption. Some projects had already managed this challenge, but with solutions which were expensive and not scalable, so that only big ships could afford the system. As a result, the system was not widespread as sailing or kiting. The approach is to develop an inexpensive system, mainly based on existing hardware items and software components. This should allow a democratisation of kite steering unit for pleasure boats, then small work boats. This should enable to gain experience on automatic kite steering.