AberSailBot

AberSailBot SailBot is a university society I joined in my first year. We built and raced self-driving robot sailboats. I joined the society as it seemed like a really interesting challenge to build robots that had to deal with the insane variety of variables the outside world offers. Especially in the ocean where you rely on those variables to perform even basic movement. It felt like a good chance to try and learn to program machines that had to learn and work with those concepts. First Year I spent the first year in a team of 3 building a small boat we called "floating point". We started from a polystyrene hull and had to do a number of steps to build it, none of which any of us had any experience with: Coating the hull in resin Sewing a sail Designing and 3D printing mechanisms for steering Writing ESP32 code to run it using a digital compass and GPS We were building these along with other teams, the idea being at the end of the building period they would be tested and raced. By…