[taneq]

A simulation doesn’t necessarily need to be remotely physically accurate to be useful, as long as the simulated behaviour is qualitatively similar to the real thing. For sailing a small boat, I’d imagine the important things would be the shape of the sail and the heel of the boat for a given apparent wind, presented to whatever sensors your sailbot is using. For the water’s surface, random semi-regular perturbation (sum of sine waves) would be fine, and something similar (or maybe a random walk) for wind direction and strength.

For this kind of real-world robotics, you can’t optimise in any academic sense so you just have to go for effective and robust.

[bodangly]

Well, for the drones, we did base things off ground truth captured in a mocap lab, and this helped the models significantly. There always will be a jump from simulation to real world, but the smaller you make that jump the quicker you’ll have a functioning vehicle. Without that, you can spend a ton of time (wasted) in simulation when the real world is substantially different. I’m sure a sum of sine waves would get you somewhere, but only so far. To me this is a difficult problem and I think it might be best to do most development in a real world environment.

[taneq]

I was just talking about sailboats specifically, where the external forces are highly unpredictable and similar in magnitude (albeit hopefully a fair bit smaller!) than your control authority over the boat.

The work you did on drones sounds very cool and in that scenario (high powered motors, crazy nonlinear dynamics, relatively small external perturbation, at least from how you described it?) I don't doubt that ground truthing your simulation using mocap data made a huge difference.

[munificent]

> as long as the simulated behaviour is qualitatively similar to the real thing.

My point is that I suspect that unless you have a very sophisticated simulation, it won't be.

> I’d imagine the important things would be the shape of the sail

The shape of a sail is itself a very complex thing to model and simulate. I'm not even a real sailor and I'm already thinking about camber, twist, and luffing. When sailing upwind, the sail is functioning like a wing using lift. When sailing downwind, it's relying on drag. Points in between use a mixture. This implies that turbulence and stall must be simulated at some level of fidelity.

If you've got a mainsail and a jib, then you have to worry about the slot effect and one sail blocking the wind of the other.

> and the heel of the boat for a given apparent wind

Not just heeling, but weather helm, leeway, drag, displacement, and how those interact.