Transatlantic and Circumnavigateing the globe!

ArduRover ArduBoat
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Honestly - sounds like an AMAZING project. I personally develop autonomous USV systems and am trying to make an ocean-ready version! Check out my project here: https://rlxamerica.wixsite.com/projectorrca

BTW ^ that’s not just shameless self advertising, that’s to show you what I did with Ardupilot and arduboat and the website has many resources on how I did things.

Some other things to look at - solar power the easiest way to do this is use a 12v lead-acid batter (like a car battery). These type of batteries can be hooked up into a solar power system and then directly to the “power-in” on your craft.

You’ll need these:

(1) Solar Charge Controller

(2) Lead-Acid Battery

(3) Solar Panel

Both the solar panel and the battery hook up to the charge controller, then you can wire the DC outputs on the charge controller straight to the ESC of your boat.

Few more tips for you - you’re going to need a REALLY strong hull and a relatively large boat. And I’m talking large like a 12 foot kayak would be the SMALLEST I would go. Also our craft would need to be made of fiberglass or some high-strength material that could survive ocean waves, swells, etc. Propulsion system wise, I would recommend multiple Blue Robotics T200 systems and their respective ESCs - I use the T200 on my craft and have never been disappointing.

I wish you the best of luck - again I have some experience with these things so do let me know if there is anything I can do to help out! Interesting project, ambitious, I love it!

2 Likes
22

Also relevant to this thread, check out the Microtransat competition if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a race (although noone has yet completed it) to cross the Atlantic either West>East or East>West.

We’re competing this year, with a 2.4m long solar powered vessel, with Ardurover running as the core code. We built the hull ourselves and it is extremely strong! The core code has been added to a bit to introduce some redundancy management (we have 2 engines, 2 rudders, etc) and power management, but the navigation code is unchanged. I’m also working (see other thread) on AIS integration and I hope that this and a few other little bits might find their way into the codebase when I have time to clean them up a bit :slight_smile:

As a rough outline, we have 200W of solar panels, about 2880Wh of battery capacity and continuous propulsion power at our cruise speed of about 1.7kn is around 50W. This comes from a pair of brushless motors DST-700 (the same as openROV use). We’ve tested them up to thousands of hours with no real issues.

I think it’s great that we can now consider doing these kinds of things on not much more than hobby budget, good luck!

1 Like
23

RWinn,

Great to hear! If you bump into problems, I’m standing by to help!