The flipside


While the shorthanded boom continues unabated it is also party time for the engineers busily developing ever more advanced (and costly) new pilot systems; and for those paid to then fine-tune them. Less of an issue in a €5million per annum Imoca programme, more of a worry for the Sun Fast 3200s and their like powering this explosion at the grass roots. Andy Claughton takes stock


Singlehanded sailors have always wrestled with the problem that it’s hard to do much else if you are steering. So from day one


34 SEAHORSE


various approaches have been developed to give the crew a break from helming. Things initially advanced from lashing


the tiller to increasingly sophisticated vane systems linked to a servo rudder – so that an apparent wind angle could be main- tained using only the force derived from the wind vane. The model yachting com- munity also developed beautifully made confections of brass, Tufnol and balsa wood to race their yachts. The boats were tacked by the skippers using a pole when the lake side was reached. There was no thought of stored power to make things work, so the mechanisms were akin to clockwork, ie no wasted energy. Now computers and mechanical actuators


have rendered these mechanical marvels obsolete. Every yacht has the option to fit an autopilot system that can sail a course and hold a wind angle. Energy is in abun- dant supply and the engineering is about code not mechanisms. There is literally no limit to the sophistication of the systems. And in truth we’ve only just begun. Modern autopilots for racing yachts are


complex systems. They not only sense the wind direction with great accuracy but also the rates of change of pitch, heel and yaw, the rudder load and angle, the foil bending moment, plus any other sensor that might help it work out when and how


it should waggle the tiller. The pilot can learn by watching the ‘human bean’ sailing and then mimic their behaviour. Given adequate resources (a team of


three or four will do) the software can use the logged data to continually improve a yacht’s autopilot(s) using Neural Net- works… aka Artificial Intelligence. This is the state of art, but to date the


human beans have had one big advantage: they can see. The best autopilots are as good as the human at night, but in daylight sight of the oncoming waves still gives a good helmsman an advantage. On the horizon, no pun intended, there


are technologies that may change that. Twenty years ago the problem of helming in big head seas in the dark was a pressing issue for the Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij (KNRM), the Dutch version of the RNLI. In daylight the helmsman could see the waves ahead and throttle up and down to mitigate against large slams while making best speed to the casualty. In the dark it was a lottery – go too slow and lives may be lost, go too fast and you can damage the boat and the crew. Their approach to a solution was to use


forward-looking radar/Lidar to detect the approaching waves, and couple this to the throttle and ride control system. I don’t know if it was ever finally implemented,


PIERRE BOURAS/DPPI


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