World-first: Tiny autonomous boat completes 3,555-mile Atlantic crossing in 127 days
SMRTR summary
A four-foot robotic sailboat just crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and nobody was steering.
The Oshen C-Star PC13 departed Gran Canaria in May and arrived in Barbados 127 days later, becoming the first vessel to complete the Microtransat Challenge after more than 30 previous attempts since the competition began in 2010.
The crossing was Oshen's third try. Earlier attempts ended in failure, once after barely six miles, and once after nearly a year at sea when heavy waves destroyed the sail. This time, the vessel survived 30-foot swells, a tropical storm, and a mysterious rudder malfunction mid-ocean, eventually correcting itself and pressing on.
But the real story is what comes next. Oshen envisions fleets of these tiny autonomous boats acting as floating weather stations, gathering ocean data continuously and cheaply. One C-Star was already deployed inside the eyewall of Hurricane Humberto in 2025, transmitting data while the storm raged around it.
The ocean, it turns out, has a new kind of observer.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Interesting Engineering.
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