Learning to surf

Mr. Mans Scholten of the University of Amsterdam, department of Computer Science, is currently working with RoboSail systems on learning to surf a sailing ship over waves. This work involves the prediction of waves, based on regularities therein, and the subsequent learning of the ships behavior when sailing through significant waves.

“It’s by no means a trivial task”, mr. Scholten comments. “It will involve a lot of research into several sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence. Fuzzy Logic will have a place in this, but Neural Networks and Reinforcement learning will be part of the equation as well. It’s a great thing to already have hundreds of databases to learn information from; sailing data is hard to come by but even harder to interpret!”

Surfing motion is a very complex dynamic. It takes a human sailor quite a while to master the skill, and even then, he needs to concentrate very intensely. It is a known fact that professional helmsmen can only helm optimally for a few hours. “Imagine what it would be like to have an artificially intelligent autopilot steering the ship at a performance near that of a top-notch sailor! I’m not saying we’re there yet, but we will come a long way. The RoboSail Odys™ Pilot is already superior to existing pilots”, mr Scholten says enthusiastically.

As usual, reports on this research project, which is currently in full swing, will appear on this website.