Model Sailboats as a Testbed for Artificial Intelligence Methods

The design of autonomous robots is a challenging research topic involving a wide range of algorithms and methods from artificial intelligence. A number of ambitious projects like the DARPA challenge, RoboCup, or the Microtransat present well defined scenarios for the development of specialized autonomous robots. We propose to add robot sailing using model sailboats as another scenario. Similarly to the RoboCup soccer robots, model sailboats are relatively cheap and easy to transport. On the one hand, this allows to study methods needed to build and improve ocean going autonomous vessels. Moreover, it would be fairly straightforward to have one design races of robot sailboats against humans. We present results on building two small and lightweight robot sailboats which we plan to use as a test environment in a student project on artificial intelligence.