APASail—An Agent-Based Platform for Autonomous Sailing Research and Competition

Abstract

This paper presents an Agent-based Platform for Autonomous Sailing—APASail—intended to support real and simulated competitions as well as assess navigation and boat modelling algorithms. The platform provides back-end services—competition server, boat modelling and data storage—and supports external browsers and software agents as front-end clients. The back-end adopts the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm for the internal modelling of sailing boats and offers a Web Service Application Programming Interface (API) for the external software agents and a Web application for Web browsers. As a whole, the platform offers tracking (real competitions) and simulation (simulated competitions) modes. The testing and assessment of navigation algorithms and boat models correspond to private simulated competitions. In simulation mode, the back-end internal boat agent implements a simplified physical model, including the weight, sail area, angle of the sail and rudder, velocity and direction of the wind and position and velocity of the hull, whereas the front-end external boat agent implements the navigation algorithm on the team side, ensuring the privacy of strategic knowledge. The Web application allows the configuration and launching of competitions, the registration of teams and researchers, the uploading of boat physical features for simulation as well as the live or playback viewing of real and simulated competitions. The simulation mode is illustrated with the help of a case study. The APASail platform, which is open, scalable, modular and distributed, was designed for the research community to prepare, run and gather data from real and simulated autonomous sailing competitions.