But once their 18-foot sailboat, Raye, sets course for Hawaii, it will be hands-free. That’s because it will sail the open sea autonomously, thanks to computer programming and solar power. The so-called “sailbot” was designed entirely by students – more than 200 were involved – and took six years to build, according to the team’s co-captain. “Sailing is a sport of feel, you look at the sail to see how full it is to adjust its angle,” said UBC Sailbot’s Asvin Sankaran. “Then trying to quantify that … is an impressive challenge. “We really want to push the boundaries of engineering and push the boundaries of the marine industry; autonomous technology is extremely ‘in’ right now.” The 20ft vessel is scheduled to sail from Victoria later this month. Its two sails are expected to carry it more than 2,500 km to Maui, Hawaii — without a captain on board or navigators to guide it from afar. The UBC Sailbot team’s 18-foot autonomous, robotic sailboat Raye — scheduled to set sail from Victoria later this month — is seen on the water near Vancouver in March. (Submitted by UBC Sailbot) The launch of the robotic sailboat comes almost five years after their previous attempt failed. But there were also lessons learned. “I want to see the headline that Raye made it to Maui,” said Justin Reiher, who participated in the team’s latest ocean crossing attempt. “I think that would be a testament to the students’…ingenuity.”
“Unfinished business with full ocean passage”
In late 2017, Raye’s predecessor, Ada – a sailboat the same length as Raye, but slightly narrower – was found floundering without its mast off the coast of Florida, a year after the team lost contact with the vessel off the Azores archipelago, almost 2,500 km across the Atlantic Ocean. Ada was supposed to sail from Newfoundland to Ireland, but even though she was lost at sea and left standing after a hurricane, she still set a record for the longest transatlantic distance traveled by any autonomous vessel. After it was recovered by a research vessel from the University of New Hampshire, members of the UBC Sailbot removed it to study what went wrong and why. A key failure they found with Ada – which unlike the student-designed Raye was designed by a naval professional – was that Ada’s rudder broke, rendering her unable to steer. Raye is set to sail from Victoria to Hawaii, a distance of more than 2,500 km (CBC) In fact, project co-leader David Alexander said he still considers the Ada mission a success because of the many lessons learned since then. “Everything we do for Raye, and for our next projects, builds from that first step,” Alexander said. “And so having a kind of unfinished business with a full ocean crossing is a real driving force behind Raye.” Most of the components have been “completely redesigned”, its engineers said – including a stronger carbon fiber hull and new algorithms for navigation. And the new sailboat has two rudders, just in case. The team named the new vessel after Raye Montague, an American naval engineer who was the first person to design a ship entirely by computer in 1971. “He demonstrated incredible innovation and tenacity,” the UBC Sailbot website says of Montague, who died in 2018. In the six years of planning to build the vessel, more than 200 UBC students were involved, the team said. They come from a range of engineering fields and interests. Many see the project as an essential part of their learning — whether Raye actually makes it to Hawaii’s shores or not, Sankaran said. “So if it ends up in Japan, it ends up in Japan.”
