About Kalopa Robotics

Kalopa Robotics Limited was created to investigate the software, hardware and hull design of autonomous sailboats. We are currently building a two metre (2m LOA) sailboat to compete in the Microtransat autonomous sailboat race.

The Main Mission

The main objective for our sailboat, Beoga Beag, is to cross the Atlantic, from Newfoundland home to Ireland, without any outside assistance. This is the definition of the Microtransat. Autonomously. The boat must be programmed for every eventuality and be able to navigate by itself from start to finish. It must report its position several times a day, and cannot accept inbound communications.

You can find the rules on the Microtransat web site, here.

However, before we can attempt that particular mission, we have a variety of smaller challenges.

We will add the details of those challenges to this page, once we've had a chance to update the mission requirements.

The Team

Dermot Tynan is a software engineer and a sailor. He has sailed lots of different dinghy types, and is a senior sailing instructor with over 5,000 nautical miles of mostly offshore sailing. He has over thirty years of professional experience in the software industry, working for companies in Silicon Valley, as well as the UK and Ireland. He currently works for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, but not on robotic sailboats.

More about the others, later on...

The Technology

Kalopa Robotics vessels uses a wide range of open source software and components to operate effectively.

You can find all of the code we have released for our vessels on GitHub. As the race is a competitive event, we will time-delay the release of each of the components. Also, we would like to see them working properly before we push them to github!

• FreeBSD is a Unix Operating System used by Mother.
• Ruby, a high-level programming language.
• Redis is a NoSQL database used for storing mission data.
• AVR GCC is a C compiler and development environment for the Atmel AVR chip.
• AVR Dude AVR programming software.
• USBTiny Programmer to program the boards

This page lists as many of the technologies as we can remember. We'll keep adding to the list as more pieces are added, or we remember stuff we hadn't mentioned.

 Kalopa On The Internet

We have a wide Internet presence from sites such as Github and Facebook through Youtube, Twitter and Instagram. The following are some of our external sites:

• Our Github page has all (or most) of the source code we have developed, for building and testing robotic sailboats.
• We have a LinkedIn page for keeping up to date on the company.
• We post fairly regularly to Facebook, so follows us on there for up to the minute news.
• We post pictures to Instagram during the build and development, so it's a great place to see stuff being built.
• Not only do we tweet but we also have tweets from some of our vessels.
• Finally, we post videos to Youtube of the build, the tests, and other stuff. Why not subscribe and keep up to date?

We'd love it if you followed us on the various platforms, because it's great to know that people are following what we are doing.