Small and Inexpensive Single-Board Computer for Autonomous Sailboat Control

This work presents a computer board designed for autonomous robotic sailboat control. Taking advantage of the current availability of feature-rich processors such as the LPC3130 from NXP and the MC13224v from Freescale Semiconductor used in this work, our design emphasizes low cost and power consumption, as well as small size. At the same time, the system is not excessively specialized; it runs 32-bit Linux and has network capability via Ethernet, WiFi, cellular or Bluetooth USB sticks. The computing system presented in this work is applicable to a variety of robotic sailboat applications, including making a 0.5 m Graupner Micro Magic fully autonomous without relying on a shore-side base station for computation.