Reflexions on feedforward control strategies for a class of sailing vehicles

Sailing vehicles, whether they are sea or land-based, share the unique property of exhibiting totally different trajectories depending on where their direction of travel is with respect to the wind. Following our previous work, this paper discusses a few points related to feedforward control and motion planning of surface sailing vehicles. More specifically, we examine the interplay between simple controllability reasonings and motion planning. These few remarks are used in a constructive way for automatic generation of start/stop maneuvers of a simple model of sailing vehicles. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the approach.