River Rat

Dates

February 2004 — January 2005

Principal Investigator

Claudio Cairoli

Problem

Spectators, coaches, and sailors watching sailboat racing from shore often have a difficult time figuring out which boats in the races are winning and how well their friends are sailing.

Goal

To make sailing more fun and easy to watch by utilizing GPS and radio technology to track MIT=92s fleet of boats in real-time and displaying races on a screen, so that spectators can more easily observe racing and that competitors can watch their races and improve their skills.

Overview

The RiverRat project involved designing hardware and software for real-time tracking of MIT sailboats on the Charles River. This allows for spectators to watch a bird's-eye view of races on a monitor at the sailing pavilion. The system also records and plays back sailboat tracks for later post-race analysis of tactics, strategy, and performance.

While most sailors will tell you that sailing is the most involved and exciting sport they participate in, it can be difficult to watch, especially for untrained spectators. This is because racing occurs half a mile from the shore and the spectators cannot identify their friend or teammates. Even when races take place close to land, the view that spectators have is highly skewed due to the perspective, making very difficult to identify what boat is leading and which are trailing.

The RiverRat system is a lightweight, robust, real-time, tracking system for up to 30 boats on the Charles River. This system will serve to increase spectator involvement and interest by giving them the perspective of a blimp looking down on MIT's boats on the Charles River while setting up the foundation for a system which could aid in educating sailors in racing tactics and sailing skills, and improving boating safety on the Charles River. Not only does RiverRat set out to improve sailing's appeal to spectators, it serves as an innovative tool for teaching sailing to both novices and advanced sailors. With the system implemented, it will be easy to add on additional functionalities to the tracking devices in order to keep tabs on recreational sailors and to warn the dock staff of capsized or boats in other danger.

Having the RiverRat system installed at the MIT Sailing Pavilion will make the sport much more accessible and interesting to spectators, and will allow sailors to improve their skills in ways that current technology does not allow.

Project Output

Links

RiverRat