A robot boat built has successfully reached the coast of Ireland after completing a successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, two and a half months after setting off from Canada. Offshore Sensing AS, a technology company based in Bergen, Norway, built the Sailbuoy Met to compete in a challenge for robotic boats, the so-called Microtransat Challenge. The vessel started its journey in Newfoundland, Canada, and traveled east to become the first unmanned sailboat to cross the Atlantic. It reached Ireland on August 26. More than 20 teams have previously tried and failed to complete the race, with boats getting trapped in fishing nets or losing their way at sea. “The reason for the Atlantic crossing was one, nobody’s done it before and two, it’s a very challenging crossing,” said David Peddie, the 51-year-old chief executive of Offshore Sensing. The success of the Sailbuoy Met marks a significant achievement. The surfboard-shaped vessel was covered with solar panels to provide power for navigation and satellite communications kit linked to the Global Positioning System. With a sail mounted towards its rear, it traveled at a speed of three knots. The project began in 2005 when Mr Peddie worked at Christian Michelsen Research, an independent research institution focused on building drifter buoys, anchored floats that could be steered rather than being left to drift on the sea’s surface. His initial experiences developed into experience with sailing, which is when ideas for the blueprint of the sailboat started to emerge. The SB Met was built to be just under 2.4 metres long to fit within the regulations of the Microtransat competition and had to regularly transmit location data. Technology intelligence - newsletter promo - EOA According to Mr Peddie, the vessel was refined after testing it in the rough weather conditions off the coast of Norway. “The weather is particularly bad in that area of the ocean: you’ve got icebergs, you’ve got stuff floating in the oceans, nets, fishing boats, you name it you’ve got it,” he said. “But we have been developing this for many years so it’s designed to withstand collisions with bigger boats, you can actually run it down and you won’t break it.” Despite the success, Mr Peddie is cautious about scaling up the size of the vessel. A bigger unmanned robot boat would require a much stronger hull to withstand the harsh conditions of the ocean, as well as new regulations to prevent collisions with other vessels such as cruise liners or oil tankers. “The thing is you start to present a danger for other boats out on the ocean [at a bigger size], but this size now doesn’t present any danger so it’s harmless for other boats to run into it,” he said. “When you scale up it’s sort of like going from one of these small drones to a helicopter. You can’t have a great big vessel out there without being able to anticipate every scenario.” The current agenda for Mr Peddie and the team at Offshore Sensing is to assess current limitations on the boat, while advancing the features that gave it the sturdiness to cross the harsh waters. He sees immediate use for the boat technology in research applications such as measuring ocean salinity or air pressure, but can see a commercial market emerging too once the potential of the technology is fully realised and can be harnessed. “You can use it to search for fish, evaluating fish stocks. How much fish we have got is useful for governments so they can say how big their quotas are going to be. “You can map rubbish in the ocean by using intelligent camera processing to map how much floating debris you see there both under the water and above the water and map the area of an oil spill, so there’s a lot of applications you can use it for. But it’s new technology, it’s not mature,” he said. The International Maritime Organisation is currently reviewing the safety and security of widespread deployment of these boats. Mr Peddie admits there is potential for unmanned, autonomous boats to be hijacked and used for things such as smuggling, but believes Offshore Sensing has taken necessary precautions to prevent this from happening. “Any vessel we sell at any point in time, we will be able to take control of it and lock the customer out if they use this for something they shouldn’t be using it for,” he said. “You can’t fiddle with the electronics or anything like that or the whole thing stops working. That’s our way of dealing with it. You can try to hack into it, the only thing you will be able to do is render the electronics useless. You won’t be much better off than trying to built it yourself.”
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