Position-hold buoy

i race and organize ocean sailboat races. One of the difficulties in having a race is setting a buoy for the boats to race around. Now, a buoy is tethered to an anchor that is placed on the ocean’s bottom. I would like to create a buoy that would, as a minimum, hold it’s position on the surface in the water for a minimum of two hours without an anchor. This buoy would have a flag on a two meter pole and a light for visibility. For reference, see the movable marks used in the last America’s Cup run in San Francisco. Suggestions?

@Patrickshuss
It sounds like you need a platform, much like the floating drilling platforms, that use thrusters to maintain position in the X and Y plane directions on the surface of the ocean.
You could use a Pixhawk and associated ESCs to drive Blue Robotics T100 thrusters, but it is not going to be a trivial nor inexpensive project.
Regards,
TCIII AVD

I also have this requirement - I need a barge-type float to hold GPS position for holding equipment.

Guess I’ll have to look at coding it!

Did you Guys ever get any further with this ?

http://ardupilot.org/rover/docs/loiter-mode.html

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getiing into the Flight MOde isnt the problem its getting it to perform the mode i want it to do ?

I really think that Rover-3.5 should work well for this application. My main sponsor (elab.co.jp) wanted loiter mode added partially for this purpose. Below is a video of a “box boat” which is just a box with two thrusters on it. It doesn’t perform as well as the boogie-board boat does (the video Peter Hall posted above) but a floating autonomous buoy might be quite similar.

rmackay9 ,

is there any way you can send you your Parameters ? Mine isn’t that smooth and I’ve been fighting with the Parameters
Thanks