Modeling and Control Design of a Robotic Sailboat

This paper presents a method to obtain a full 6 degrees of freedom dynamic model of a robotic sailing boat starting from the description of forces and torques acting on it. A general 6-DOF model is first described and then simplified to obtain a 3-DOF control-oriented one. Relying on it, a rudder controller and a sail’s trimming calculator are proposed. This controller has been validated using a numerical implementation of the proposed dynamic model.