OceanVoy: A Hybrid Energy Planning System for Autonomous Sailboat

Towards long range and high endurance sailing, energy is of utmost importance. Moreover, benefiting from the dominance of the sailboat itself, it is energy-saving and environment-friendly. Thus, the sailboat with energy planning problem is meaningful. However, until now, the sailboat energy optimization problem has rarely been considered. In this paper, we focus on the energy consumption optimization of an autonomous sailboat. It has been formulated as a Nonlinear Programming problem (NLP). We deal with it with a hybrid control scheme, in which pseudo-spectral (PS) optimal control method is used in heading control, and a model-free framework guided by Extreme Seeking Control (ESC) is used in sail control. The optimal path is generated with the optimal input motor torques in time series. As a result, both simulation and experiments have validated motion planning and energy planning performance. Notably, about 7% of energy is saved on average. Our proposed method can make sailboats sailing longer and sustainable.