San Francisco beckons for Aber Sailbot team
A team comprising of three Aberystwyth University undergraduate students from the Department of Computer Science will be competing later this week (Saturday 7 June 2014) in Sailbot2014, an annual robotic sailing competition which is being held this year in San Francisco. Since 2012, the Aber Sailbot team has been creating and competing in autonomous robotic sailing competitions which saw them clinch third place in Sailbot2013 and win the award for the Best Open Source Architecture at the World Robotic Sailing Championships in France last year. The boats themselves are robots and are controlled by inbuilt state-of-the-art GPS system which allows them to navigate themselves around any course, similarly to a Sat-Nav system. Each team must build and program an autonomous sailing boat to compete in a range of events against other teams with no human interaction to control the boat. Daniel Clark, a second year Computer Science student and an Aber Sailbot team member, explains; “We wanted t...