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AI & Autonomy

Five Degrees of Wrong.

By Dermot Tynan • March 16, 2013

So, as I mentioned, the virtual boat was too eager to tack. If you're dead downwind of the mark, and you set off on a starboard tack, within a metre of being on the left-hand side of the course, the other tack is favoured.

I added code that essentially stated "unless the other tack is at least five degrees better than the existing one, ignore it." So, if I'm at 44 degrees TWA and the other tack is better by a degree (-43 say), stay where you are. This works quite nicely. If you look at the plotted course, it shows the boat sailing nice upwind legs, to the waypoint. As Henry would say, "it's sailing up the ladder."

Vessel Technology

The Software...

By Dermot Tynan • March 19, 2013

I've been asked recently, about the software platforms used on board Beoga Beag. This seems as good a time as any, to talk about the various layers. As mentioned previously, the lower layer is a custom board, running an ATmega8 Atmel processor. The software (Igor and Otto) is custom-written in C for the boat.

Vessel Technology

REDIS

By Dermot Tynan • October 26, 2013

After a lunchtime conversation with a friend of mine, I ditched some of the earlier design considerations around message-passing and MQ-based systems in favour of the NoSQL database Redis.