UBC Sailbot

Founded in 2005, UBC Sailbot is a student-led engineering design team of 80+ undergraduate students from engineering, sciences, business, and arts. We work on designing, constructing, testing, and launching fully autonomous sailboats, and we do so fully out of an interest in engineering (not for credit).

We originally began with semi-autonomous sailboats and took part in competitions, but eventually, we realized we needed a greater challenge and launched Ada, our first fully autonomous sailboat in 2016. It was intended to autonomously sail from the east coast of Canada to Ireland, but unfortunately only made it about a third of the way there due to hurricanes (three of them to be exact).

Ada was recovered in 2017, and its post-failure analysis influenced the design of our second fully autonomous sailboat, Raye. The goal of Raye was to autonomously sail from the west coast of Canada to Maui, Hawaii. Raye was unfortunately retired in the summer of 2023.

Currently, we are developing POLARIS, a 3-meter fully autonomous sailboat capable of collecting oceanic and atmospheric data in the Pacific Ocean. Having proven that we can succeed in this field, we will be using our autonomous sailboat to collect oceanic and atmospheric climate data for ocean conservation.

We will be using PCBs throughout the boat for a variety of tasks, from the control electronics for the rudder to the data logging of critical scientific sensors. There will be at least 5 different PCBs on board, and as such, our team would greatly appreciate sponsorship from PCBWay. As a student design team, sourcing parts and manufacturing within our budget and timeline is a constant challenge. Having the ability to rapidly prototype would allow us to iterate through more designs and perfect our electrical systems while providing more students with an opportunity to expand their skills.

If you are interested in learning more about us and our past projects, you can check out our website at ubcsailbot.org or please feel free to contact us through email. We would be more than happy to answer any questions you might have!