Robotic boat crosses Atlantic ocean unaided

A robotic boat designed by a Plymouth-based maritime technology company has crossed the Atlantic Ocean entirely unaided.

Oshen said its 4ft (1.2m) long robotic sailing boat crossed the finish line east of Barbados on 13 September, having set sail from Gran Canaria on 7 May.

It said the C-Star PC13 covered a total of 2,926 nautical miles (5,400km) and its team was the first to complete the Microtransat Challenge of a small sailing boat independently crossing the Atlantic without human intervention.

C-Stars have solar panels with the power used for sensors and adjusting the fixed sail to make the best use of the wind.

CEO and co-founder Anahita Laverack said: "The reason people get sucked in is they think: 'Come on, why can't you get a robot to do what Christopher Columbus did 500 years ago.'

"Turns out it's a lot harder than you think. But that's why so many people got inspired and tried, only to find the ocean is tough."

The challenge was created by two academics - Dr Mark Neal and Dr Yves Briere - and has been attempted by more than 30 teams across the world, including Shanghai University, the United States Navy, the French Navy and a Polish entrepreneur who came very close to completing it.

Laverack said: "I first started on this challenge, on the engineering side, five years ago, so it's been a labour of a lot of love to be the first in the world to do this."

The 26-year-old described Oshen's first attempt as a "complete failure" after breaking down 10 days at sea. However, they were able to learn from the experience.

"The primary learning was that it's very hard to make something easily removable, low cost and waterproof.

"It sounds very simple, but it turns out it's not."

The second attempt was launched from Plymouth and spent 220 days at sea before a failure of the mast mechanism and mast meant its attempt had to be abandoned.

"The third and final one, we were reliably doing missions over 100 days of duration, so we were relatively confident that it would cross," she said.

While tracking the robotic boat, Laverack said she tried not to get her hopes up because it was something the team had worked on for years.

"I really didn't want it to crash or break a few days out and for us all to be heartbroken.

"It's just been such a moment for the whole company."

She said they would collect the data from the C-Star PC13 and then the vessel itself would be retired at a turtle sanctuary in Barbados.

The company, which moved to Plymouth in 2022, started with just 10 people and now has about 30.

Laverack said, beyond the challenge, their C-Stars were used as sensor platforms used in defence, to help safeguard undersea data cables and pipelines, to monitor illegal fishing and dark fleet tankers, and by scientists to gather oceanographic, climate and wildlife data, including sailing one directly into a category five storm, Hurricane Humberto.

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