Sailbot John Zach Jimmy

Sailbot John Zach Jimmy

Jimmy Bell

This studio's assignment was to create an autonomus sailboat that could act without the assistance of a person. With the increasing functions of robots in our world, creating a robotic sailboat seemed to be both provocative and innovative. Constructing and designing the boat hulls and sails seemed to be the simplest part of the project, but our group was quickly proven wrong by this. We ran into many obstacles such as keeping the boat water tight, making it have as little mass as possible and proportioning the weight of the sail and hulls evenly. 

After doing research on the internet and talking to both Sean and Zoz, our group decided that a multi-hulled boat would be most beneficial. Beacause there would be more than one hull, the boat would have less resistance against choppy waters and have greater balance. Though our group had figured out what the body of the boat would look like, we were still unsure as to what the sail was going to look like. After consulting a member of the Olin college robotic boating team, he advised us to make an extremely tall sail, as tall as triple the length of the boat. We took his advice and finally created a final prototype of the whole boat after a lot of trial and error. The boat ended up being a huge success, but was extremely big-- too big for the given kitty pool. Despite this, our group still felt that this was a success.