Contact us and we'll come up with an innovative project together.
We love a challenge.
Fill in your details and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
It's the culmination of 6 years' work with my team, 6 years of our lives developing the MADBrain Autopilot . Since the arrival of the two skippers, we've been receiving a lot of congratulations, which is very gratifying!
Like all innovations, our Autopilot is the result of an intuition: we can do better than what exists. In the early days, we were developing our WindNavigation processor , trying to understand the black box of our competitors, which was an ordeal... Fortunately, and we thank them for this, skippers who are as demanding and technology-crazy as we are, have trusted us to design a new Autopilot, like Jérémie Beyou or François Gabart, in 2015, with a view to making gains on his round-the-world voyage. Our advantage is that we started from scratch. But above all, we're a great team, with talented people like Benoît, Hugo, Clément, Jérémie, Nicola, Mathilde... After that, it's also an entrepreneurial adventure, with a fund-raising round in 2016 that enabled us to innovate.
A good Autopilot is first and foremost one you trust Autopilot After all, we entrust it with the steering 99% of the time! Electronics can boost performance, but they can also make you lose ground. So we don't have the right to make mistakes. We develop quite complex hardware and software, far removed from a selfie application or an electronic box to open a gate! Sailors need to be able to sleep soundly, bug-free.
Secondly, a good Autopilot must make the boat fast, reaching its target speeds. That's the challenge we've met. According to all the skippers, ourtailor-made MADBrain Autopilot steers better than they do in most situations. As boats go faster and faster, MADBrain's steering finesse, reaction time and concentration are often better than the human hand and brain.
ATLANTIC OCEAN, FRANCE - SEPTEMBER 2: French skipper Charlie Dalin is training on APIVIA for the Vendee Globe sailing race on the Atlantic ocean, France, on September 2, 2020. (Photo by Vincent Curutchet/Alea)
This does not mean that ocean racing has become a race for drones. It is still the sailors who choose their route, who manage these cathedrals of carbon, canvas and bits. I am really impressed by the human commitment that this represents. The skippers in the Vendée Globe are real modern heroes. They make us dream.
We are very happy with the sporting performance of Yannick and Charlie, not forgetting Thomas and Giancarlo. At one point in the race we had 7 boats in the top 10!
My greatest satisfaction was being able to sleep... The 24-hour emergency call number we set up hardly rang at all. The Autopilot and Navigation processor worked without interruption for over 80 days. We had anticipated sensor problems, such as overheads, by offering automatic detection and switching between redundant sensors. For this first Vendée Globe, it's a great success for our Autopilot.
We will continue to improve fault tolerance. We have to find a solution with the aerial suppliers, the wind measurement suppliers, to avoid malfunctions. We have some ideas...
And above all, we have to ensure the safety of the sailors! I'm very upset by Boris's collision. Today, this type of accident should no longer happen! On-board technologies like AIS and radar work perfectly. At Madintec, we have developed an obstacle-avoidance solution specially adapted to sailboats. The Autopilot changes course to avoid an accident. I hope our solution will become widespread for the next Vendée Globe.
You only have to sail a new generation boat with big foils once to realise that we will never go back. On the surface, the average differences between the new and old foilers are not obvious, but the top speeds of the new foilers are impressive. You can double the wind speed.
What's missing now is flight stability. It's a very exciting challenge that we're going to achieve. I can't tell you much about it at the moment, but it's based on brainwaves, complex algorithms and the exploitation of a large mass of data collected on board.
The context is not easy, but there are still many projects to come. Madintec continues to innovate in safety and yacht performance . I hope that class budget restrictions, particularly in the Imoca class, won't penalize us. A team's electronics budget is relatively small compared with other items. If the rules had been too restrictive 4 years ago, Madintec wouldn't exist today. The Imoca has always been a fabulous laboratory.
I hope that the innovations developed for the Vendée Globe will continue to benefit as many people as possible, as we are doing now by offering our products to the Class40s and IRCs for example.
Voiles & voiliers talks about Madintec...
The 9 boats equipped with the Madintec Autopilot on the Vendée Globe 2020: Maître Coq, Apivia, LinkedOut, Prysmian Group, DMG Mori, Initiatives Coeur, MACSF, Arkea PAprec, PRB.
Image credits (from top to bottom): Jean-Louis Carli/Alea/MaîtreMaître Coq, Yannick Bestaven, Vincent Curutchet/Aléa Disobey/Apivia, Vendée Globe 2020 cartography, Vincent Curutchet/Aléa Disobey/Apivia.
