A mission programming system for an autonomous sailboat

Robotic sailing vehicles can provide the support for carrying out long ocean sampling missions, using solely renewable energy for propulsion and for powering the computing, communication and electromechanical systems. The basic automatic sailing tasks required to visit a sequence of waypoints has already been correctly addressed by various teams. However, an effective system for specifying long term autonomous missions is necessary to fill the gap between the developers of the robotic platforms and the scientific end users, mainly interested in the data they can get. This paper presents a simple, flexible and easy to use mission programming system implemented in the autonomous sailing boat FASt. A mission is programmed by defining events and assigning to them sequences of high level actions. The support of conditional statements allows the implementation of a basic control flow mechanism to make route decisions during the deployment of the mission. Examples are presented to illustrate the construction of mission programs.