Microtransat Challenge” is the name of the competition and its track record so far is not very encouraging. In the early 2000s, a computer scientist from Aberystwyth University in Wales and a colleague at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse came up with the idea of using boats and sailboats up to a length of 2.40 meters autonomously for scientific and competitive purposes to send the ocean. A handful of teams from around the world have competed since then, but most boats didn’t get very far. The previous attempts always ended the same: lost at sea, washed ashore, missing, stopped by a fishing boat or fishing net. Autonomous sailing appears to be even more difficult than autonomous driving.
This does not deter the students of the Sailing University Group at the TU Darmstadt. Perhaps it is precisely this challenge that particularly excites her. A few of them are in the “Makerspace” this evening, an open workshop founded by citizens in Darmstadt. They meet there regularly. The white hull of the prototype, on which the team has been working for eight years now, sits enthroned on trestles. Just 2.2 meters long, with the mast 3.5 meters above the water, the boat looks like a nutshell in the face of the huge ocean and the forces of nature that it has to face on a two-month microtransat journey across the Atlantic Europe would be exposed to Florida. However, the TU students are self-confident. “As far as we know, we are the only German team working on a boat for the Microtransat,” says Lucas Herfurth.
Each team member brings specialist knowledge with them
“Technology learns to sail” is her motto. The saying goes well with a technical university, and all disciplines are represented in the team. Herfurth, for example, is studying mechatronics and information systems technology, while Ben-Jasper Kettlitz is studying mathematics. He is also studying IT security for a master’s degree, a subject that Moritz Dafelmaier also chose. Simon Kohaut is writing his doctoral thesis in computer science and has never set foot on a sailing boat in “real life”, as he explains with a grin.
Only Lucas Herfurth knows how to handle tillers, sails and winches. That helps immensely, but everyone in the ten to fifteen-strong team has their own specialist knowledge that they bring to the construction of the boat. For example, one group takes care of the on-board electronics, while others deal with robotics, mechanics or the software. These individual components have to mesh perfectly so that the boat later actually sails unmanned and energy self-sufficient, survives meter-high waves and storms and does not collide with an obstacle.
The prototype is called “roBooter”, and the students developed, designed and built each component themselves. You won’t get very far with such extreme requirements with ready-made elements from model making. “Everything has to be robust, waterproof and, above all, resilient, which means it has to be able to set itself up or repair itself,” says Herfurth. “In an emergency, nobody can intervene,” Kettlitz points out. For example, the solar panel for the energy supply of the on-board electronics is specially designed for maritime use, so that salt water does not form a crust on the surface, which reduces the electrical energy generation.
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