A Kelvin Wake Avoidance Scheme for Autonomous Sailing Robots Based on Orientation-Restricted Dubins Path

Sailboats have a wide range of applications on account of their energy-saving, environmentally benign and low-noise characteristics. This has led to the increasing popularity of research in autonomous sailing robots, with concomitant attention paid to the development of methods that ensure their safety during sailing. Sailboats are affected by obstacles and by nonlinear aerodynamic and hydrodynamic factors. In particular, sailboats are affected by the wake generated by a moving vessel, which in this letter is denoted as “moving boat”. Wakes are swift and can have severe adverse effects on a sailboat by causing it to veer off course, stall or capsize. Moreover, sailboats have low mobility and large inertia and will therefore struggle to avoid a wake. Thus, in this letter, we describe our efforts to develop a method to enable a sailboat to perform wake avoidance. We model the wake as a Kelvin wake and generate waypoints for an orientation-restricted Dubins path-based Kelvin wake-avoidance method. A V-stability-based control method has proven suitable for generating the path, after which the desired heading angle for sailboat control is obtained. The resulting wake-avoidance method is verified in simulations and experiments. It enables the sailboat to avoid alongside and toward wakes, and the qualitative results have revealed that the maximum range of roll in alongside scenario and maximum range of surge acceleration in toward scenario are reduced by 57.4% and 23.4%, respectively, relative to a situation when no wake-avoidance method was used. The maximum range of roll in toward scenario is acceptable.