Comment by joshuabaker2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuabaker2 | Hacker News Reader

This looks amazing! Wind power is totally underutilized in the shipping industry, I've been waiting for something like this for ages.

I used to be part of a team back in university making autonomous sailboats [1] and one of the things that I was surprised by when working on this was that there are a TON of hurricanes out in the middle of the ocean (we were working to build it to cross the Atlantic). We built a system to take in weather prediction data to try to avoid hurricanes, but we were building a relatively tiny boat—do large shipping vessels do this as well? I'd assume they can sail through pretty bad weather. If so, do you have ways to lower the sails easily to protect them?

Additionally, do you have any software to help inform the vessel operators how to best sail into the wind or are the net savings not worth it considering most of the propulsion is still coming from fuel-based sources?

Overall, this is super exciting and best of luck!

[1] Now at (https://www.ubcsailbot.org/)

Lowering the sails will be critical to safe operation in bad weather. The deployment process will be easily reversible, so that within a few minutes you can go from full sail to fully stowed (or any place in between), likely with emergency settings to bring the sail down faster. We don't want to limit the weather a ship would sail in without diversion, but instead just make use of reasonable winds when they are present. We certainly will want to make future software for route planning assistance, but our first step will not require the ship to change course or speed to see benefits of the sails. It's certainly worth it over all to follow the wind, but for ease of adoption that can come later.

Large cargo vessels do try to avoid bad weather, even though they can sail through most of it. It's a crew happiness, risk, and loss avoidance concern (knowing these companies, probably mostly the latter two!).

I was on a cargo ship in the pacific which diverted into the Bering Sea to avoid some weather instead of skirting just south of the Aleutian Islands as planned. The captain gots orders via satellite from a land crew that's crunching the numbers of risk vs extra fuel costs at all times for the fleet. The first mate was frustrated by how this all works. He said (English not being his first language): "This is terrible! We never get to decide anything for ourselves. We are like Muppets!". I think he meant "puppets"...

> Wind power is totally underutilized in the shipping industry

The shipping industry was 100% wind powered, with very mature technology developed and tried during centuries, and thousands upon thousands of experts in the area. Why do you think the whole industry switched to engines?

Predictability, speed, cheap fuel, a lack of understanding of climate change, etc.

We also used to have windmills to grind grain and then switched over to mills that use electricity or fossil fuels. But of course, windmills to generate electricity have become quite popular. What's old can be new again when combined with modern technologies.

Did you work with Greg Wong?! I worked with him after he graduated and heard quite a bit from him. Awesome project. :)

I did! He's awesome. I was on the software side of things and he was the mechanical but our paths crossed quite frequently.

Small world! I’ll tell him I crossed internet paths with you. Seem him relatively often.

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