DCA sponsor aber students to build a sailbot

AberSailbot is a growing team of students from Aberystwyth University who build autonomous sailing boats in their spare time. The team competes in two annual international competitions, SailBot (held in North America) and the World Robotic Sailing Championships (held in Europe). Their long term goal is to be the first people to sail a boat across the Atlantic completely autonomously by competing in the MicroTransat challenge.

Team member Dan Clark is a DCA sponsored software student and has recently returned to Aberystwyth University after a 12 month placement with us. He explained, “A growing part of what the team does is to expose more people to embedded software and hardware development. Building autonomous boats teaches a lot more about real-world embedded development than a traditional university course, and gives hands-on experience of working in a team.”

Dan went on to say, “As our team grows, we rely on sponsorship more and more to fund the things we do. Building autonomous boats is not an easy thing to do on a budget, so sponsorship from DCA really helps us go a long way!”

(© Images courtesy of Colin Sauze)

• Link to abersailbot website