Digital Twin and Control for Emulating Autonomous Sailboats with Conventional USVs: The Digital Sibling Concept

As environmental concerns and advancements in robotics continue to shape the future of marine technology, Autonomous Sailboats emerge as a promising solution for both scientific and commercial applications. Yet, testing of sensors, control algorithms, or obstacle avoidance solutions remains complex because of the fragility, cost, and difficulty of access to these systems. This work introduces the concept of Digital Sibling, which facilitates early Hardware-In-the-Loop testing. This technique enables the development of an experimental scheme where the complex system is simulated and its key behaviors are emulated by a simpler physical system via tracking. This novel concept, stemming from conventional Digital Twin techniques, is introduced and experimentally validated in this work. Notably, this work presents experiments where an Uncrewed Surface Vessel is used to emulate the behavior of an Autonomous Sailboat in line following, tacking and obstacle avoidance tasks.