Using ARM7 and μC/OS-II to Control an Autonomous Sailboat

Abstract

This paper presents some aspects of an autonomous sailboat project, we started at our university. An interdisciplinary group of students of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science are building the boat and are developing the control hard- and software. Our first attempt to control the boat combines an ARM7 microcontroller and the real time operating system μC/OS-II. Beside our first boat design, we will talk about the used control hard- and software, especially the mentioned controller and operating system, and the interaction between the components. We show the system architecture of the control system, the power consumption of the components and the different possibilities to process sensor data with the controller and the operating system.