Design, Modeling and Simulation of the Navigation and Control Systems for an Autonomous Sailboat Using ROS-Gazebo

The purpose of this article is to present the advances in the development of the navigation systems of an autonomous sailboat using the Gazebo simulation environment, which is based in ROS. This type of vessel is known as a robotic sailboat and their main characteristic is that they have the capacity to perform planning and movement tasks in an automatic manner without the need for human input. In essence, a robotic sailboat uses digital control systems to perform the same tasks that adjust the course of a traditional vessel, such as sail control and rudder actuation. The advantage of using a simulation environment such as Gazebo for this purpose is that its open-source nature allows code from different developers to be compiled and incorporated for various purposes such as the implementation of sensors or environmental variables, like wind and swell, inside the simulation. Furthermore, the package architecture that ROS uses enables a modular modeling of the different parts, mechanisms, and systems of the sailboat. In this way, changes of the various components, such as the sails, can be made, to test their performance under the same conditions. Results show that the study of different sail configurations and their control using a PID controller is possible through Gazebo.