A year and a half ago we posted about SeaBubbles — foiling electric water taxis. The idea to develop a five-person water taxi comes from Alain Thébault, the designer and skipper of record-breaking ocean-going hydrofoil Hydroptère. The distance from an idea to implementation, however, can be considerable. The SeaBubbles feature fully submerged foils which require a sophisticated control system for the craft to remain stable. The SeaBubble team are attempting to achieve a ride as smooth as a car on a well-paved road by using an advanced fly-by-wire control system. Fly-by-wire is a term used in aeronautics to describe a semiautomatic computer-regulated system for controlling the flight of an aircraft. While the SeaBubbles will not take off, they will be flying on foils. Here is a short video about the SeaBubble fly-by-wire system.
Old Salt Blog
a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea , hosted by nautical novelist Rick Spilman
What a fun idea. Yet I wouldnt be surprised the price starts around 30k.
When we see the results of relatively inexpensive drones w/their rock-stable camera work even as the drone is in turbulent wind, we have cause to be optimistic about this project. Stability, vectoring and all the rest are cooked necessities delivered on a huge scale for peanuts. Cheap (almost as cheap as sand) MEMS accelerometers, solid-state gyros and a huge base of solved, available responses to software requirements of vehicle dynamics mean all the major development and affordability problems end up concentrated in actuators, effectors etc.
Even batteries are becoming less of a roadblock.
The concept is vastly more plausible than only a decade ago.
[that is to say, plausible as a production item for a relatively large scale market– we could do all this quite a while ago but at astronomical, showstopper cost…]