The Project
Sailing
Team Darmstadt is a non profit association and an accredited campus group at the
Technische
Universität Darmstadt. We are a group of students and develop and construct
a sailing boat that is
capable of navigating and traversing the oceans unmanned and without any
external intervention while being simultaneously energy self-sufficient.
There are
other teams from different countries that have the same ambition. We
want to
compete with them at the Microtransat Challenge. Boats that fulfil a
certain
regulation have to find and sail their way to a given destination
without
external intervention at this competition. The route in 2009 for
example leads
from Ireland to the Caribbean.
To
let a
sailing boat traverse the oceans without telecommanding it
is
comparable to let a roving vehicle drive on the surface of Mars. It has to
face
extreme weather conditions and solve a myriad of problems
automatically.
This might
be a reason why nobody has succeeded yet.
Our
team consists of students from different
disciplines such as Computer Sciences, Mechanical Engineering,
Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Physics. In this
interdisciplinary team and
in
cooperation with other associations and institutions we want to put
this
project into action.