World Championship for autonomous and unmanned sailing boats

The seventh annual World Robotic Sailing Championship and International Robotic Sailing Conference comes to Galway, Ireland on September 8-13.

The WRSC is a competition open to fully autonomous and unmanned sailing boats up to 2.5m in length. The accompanying International Robotic Sailing Conference (IRSC) provides a venue to discuss the broad range of scientific problems involved in the design and development of autonomous sailboats.

WRSC2014 will include a series of short distance racing, navigation and autonomy challenges. The competition will propose tasks such as station, speed in different conditions, accuracy, obstacle avoidance, target tracking, endurance and cooperation. The competition, originally designed for sailboats also includes a separate motorboats category.

Teams from Galway, Wales, the US, Finland, France, Portugal and Russia are planning to attend.

Previous events were held in Austria (2008), Portugal (2009), Canada (2010), Germany (2011), Wales (2012) and Brest (France) in 2013.

Event website: http://wrsc2014.com/