A high-level interface for a sailing vessel

Sammanfattning: Christiane is a 7 meter sailing vessel and a 1:30 scale model of Oceanbird, a wind powered car carrier planned to be launched by the year 2024. The model is used for design validation and to research control algorithms. However, the development of new algorithms is limited to the microcontrollers used, which are not able to run resource intense applications. Furthermore, there is no easy way for new computational nodes to interact with the vessels system. In this thesis, a high-level, easy to use, interface was proposed, designed and implemented. This was done by identifying the the requirements and limitations of the project and examining the system to find a suitable solution. The two biggest limitations found were that the solution had to include a single-board computer and that the implementation could not drastically alter the system architecture of the model. The implementation included a single-board computer being added on top of the models architecture which publishes all gathered sensor data and actuator commands on a robotics operating system interface. The interface was an immediate improvement to the usability of the vessel since it allows for graphical presentation of gathered data in real time.