THE QUEST

TO BUILD A

drone

THAT

CAN CIRCLE

THE

GLOBE—

NO CREW

NECESSARY

B Y

A D A M

F I S H E R

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sailbo t
photographs by COREY ARNOLD

An Orange Pixel flickers on the horizon, sandwiched
between the inky azure of the mid-Pacific and the
­robin’s-egg pale of the Hawaiian sky. Richard Jenkins
is the first to see it—a sailing robot, which has been
blowing our way for a month. We’re in a small motor-
boat 7 miles out at sea, just north of Oahu’s windward
shore. Dylan Owens gets the next good glimpse. “I see
the wing,” he exclaims, “and the tail!”
Jenkins and Owens are the engineering duo behind
Saildrone, which in the words of their website is “a
wind-­powered autonomous surface ­vehicle.” On Octo-
ber 1, the 19-foot craft was set loose in the San Francisco
Bay with a ­simple command lodged in its electronic
brain: Sail to Hawaii. For 2,248 nautical miles the boat
did the rest. The path it chose happens to be identical
to that of the annual Pacific Cup sailing race, and the
fastest anyone has traversed this course is just over
five days. The ­single-handed-­sailing record is eight
adam fisher (adamcfisher@gmail.com) wrote about
the boat that could sink the America’s Cup in issue 21.06.
and a half days. As Jenkins and Owens look on, Sail-
drone is about to complete what might be called the
first no-handed ocean sail: San Francisco to Hawaii in
34 days. It’s not quick, but then again there is no one
aboard to complain.
The journey has included a storm with gale-force
winds followed by two weeks of doldrums. During the
tempest, Saildrone was reporting speeds of up to 16
miles per hour and angles as extreme as 75 degrees,
meaning it was heeled over and surfing down the back-
side of breaking waves—waves with enough power to
snap it in two had they caught the boat in the wrong
position. The doldrums were equally worrisome: With
no one aboard to scrub the bottom, algae, seaweed, and
bar­nacles might have overtaken Saildrone, transform-
ing it into just another piece of flotsam.
As the vessel sails into sight, I see that it’s a stream-
liner—a narrow hull stabilized by two outriggers, one
on each side. Its “sail” is a sail in name only; in reality it’s
a 20-foot-high, solid c­ arbon-fiber wing. Extending from
the back of this wing, halfway up the mast, is a tail—just
like an airplane’s. (“That’s a l­ ittle trick that I stole from
the Wright brothers,” Jenkins says.) Above the waterline
the boat is painted safety orange and emblazoned with
the words ocean research in progress in all caps.
The hull is black with bottom paint, and near the bow is
the name in a fancy serif: Honey Badger.
The Honey Badger is more than a sailboat and more
than a robot, although it’s both of those things. The
Pacific crossing is really a test of a new type of sail that
automatically keeps itself pointed into the wind, like a
weather vane. Adjusting a ­little tab on the back of the
tail—a task h ­ andled by the Honey Badger’s autopilot—
is enough to maintain the correct course and to angle
the wing so it creates forward thrust. There’s no need
to employ ropes, winches, or even sailors. The mecha-
nism is so ­simple it might really be best regarded as a
plug-and-play power source. Like a windmill, it con-
verts a ubiquitous natural resource into usable energy.
Its potential goes far beyond record-­setting jaunts to
Hawaii. One obvious application is to mount the wing
on a fleet of ­sensor-laden drones and send them sail-
ing into the world’s oceans, where they could report
on their findings. “I want to get the data we need to
show that global warming is real,” Jenkins says. To
that end, they could monitor ocean acidification, a key
barometer of climate change. Drones could replace the
world’s weather and tsunami buoys. The waters around
oil platforms could be sniffed 24/7 for the first signs of
a spill. Tagged sharks, whales, and other marine life
could be followed and their locations patched into
Richard
Jenkins (right) the international ­marine-­traffic control system with
designed the a warning to stay away. Protected borders, coastlines,
sailing robot; islands, and environmentally sensitive marine areas
Dylan Owens
­handles the could be patrolled by drones programmed to photo-
electronics. graph any interloping ships.
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When But scientific and security uses are just the beginning.
The biggest impact might be to industry: oil and gas, gold
Owens and mining, diamond mining, fisheries, shipping, military. For
all kinds of reasons—regulatory, exploratory, classified—
Jenkins those industries need to know what is happening in the
vast, nearly invis­ible reaches of the world’s oceans. Tal-
m e t i n 2 0 1 0, lied up, everything that is taken from or moves over the
seas constitutes more than $2.5 trillion a year in business
t h e y q u i c k ly activity—nearly 4 percent of the total world economy.
What’s more, Saildrone’s technology is so efficient
realized it could potentially power vessels that today require a
motor. Jenkins has developed a scaled-up version of his
they should wingsail to propel passenger ferries that ply the waters
of the San Francisco Bay. On windy days, the ferry motors
quit their would power down while the wings did most of the work.
By the time you read this, the ferry wing will be flying from
jobs and join a test sled backed by two government agencies, sailing
back and forth along commute routes. Jenkins is confi-
f o r c e s. dent the test will prove that in only a few years, the cost
of retrofitting the ferries will pay for itself in fuel savings.
As we draw closer, it becomes clear that the Honey
Badger has made the journey unscathed, and the mood
changes from worry to jubilation. “She looks just like I
left her!” Jenkins, the boat’s mop-headed designer, says
with genuine surprise in his voice. Owens—who is respon­
sible for Saildrone’s electronics—is similarly relieved.
“This makes it concrete,” he says. “For the past month
it’s just been an icon on a web page.”
On the way into the harbor with the Honey Badger in
tow, the men share Budweisers and congratulations.
“I was hoping to find a castaway hugging the back or a
tooth from a great white or at least some guano on the
deck,” Jenkins says. “But it’s Honey Badger,” he contin-
ues, his cherubic face twisting into the froggy expres-
sion that always proceeds a joke. Owens chimes in for
the oft-repeated punch line, a quip from the viral video
that gave the craft its name. “Honey Badger don’t care,”
and then, with feeling: “Honey Badger don’t give a shit!”
Jenkins, 37, grew up in a sailing town on the
southern coast of England. He made his first
ocean crossing at 16, working as a deckhand on
a small yacht sailing from Bermuda to Spain. At 17 he was
toiling as a draftsman at a boatyard near his hometown
of Lymington when he spied an abandoned wreck tucked
away in the back of the yard. It was an odd type of boat:
a land yacht, with wheels instead of a keel, and a hard
wing instead of a soft, floppy sail. The owner of the yard
explained that he had built it for a customer who wanted
to break the world land-­sailing speed record—which at
that time stood at 98 mph—but it had never been fin-
ished. Jenkins, sensing an opportunity to find fame and
fortune, asked if he could have the boat. The yard owner
not only agreed, he also pretended not to notice all the
carbon fiber that started going missing around the shop
as Jenkins poured himself into his repair work. “I thought
it would take only a year or two to get the record,” Jen-
kins says. In fact it took him a l­ ittle more than 10 years
and nearly got him killed a half-­dozen times.
He rebuilt the land yacht in six months, and his initial
attempts at a new record, which took place on an active
RAF airfield known for its strong crosswinds, were very
promising. The problem was money: He needed cash to
keep improving the boat. “I was just a poor student,” he
wind
says. He spent a lot of time meeting potential donors—
he even met Prince Philip—and the resulting publicity
alerted the world to his plans. But by the time Jenkins
hit 98 mph in the craft he had christened the WindJet,
an American team had raised the record to 116. To com-
pete, he needed a new, faster boat.
For the second craft, the WindJet Mark 2, Jenkins
designed a much bigger wing and added IndyCar slicks.
The traction came in handy at about 100 mph, when Jen-
kins spied a military cargo plane swooping toward his
runway with its landing lights on and its wheels down.
The Mark 3 was built of steel and tested on the high-­
traction salt flats of Western Australia. On its second run,
the lead counterweight at the front of the wing tore away
from its mount, smashed through the cockpit canopy,
1 Airplanes have tails. And tails have horizontal-
flight-­control surfaces called elevators. They govern
the plane’s pitch and thus the angle of the wings rela-
thrust tive to the air moving across them. This angle deter-
mines the lift the wings create. More lift means the
plane ascends; less lift, it descends.
Sailboats have sails. Aerodynamically speaking, a
sail is a wing. But the angle of a sail relative to the air
moving across it—the wind, in other words—is con-
trolled and adjusted by means of ropes and pulleys.
Tremendous force (and usually a winch) is needed to
set a sail so that it cuts through the wind at the correct
angle and creates the lift that moves the boat. And then
3
the problem becomes keeping the sail at the correct
2 angle. The boat may turn, which turns the sail with it.
The boat may speed up, which changes the speed and
direction of the wind passing over it. Or the wind may
shift, changing speed and direction all on its own. In
every case, the angle must be readjusted manually—
5 that’s what is meant by trimming a sail.
Once Jenkins started reaching airplane­like speeds
4 in the Greenbird, he realized he needed a machine that
worked less like a sailboat and more like an airplane. At
126 mph, even the steadiest wind changes constantly
life. Suddenly his 126-mph accomplishment seemed
pretty insignificant. “No one cares about land sailing,”
Jenkins thought, “but the first drone around the world?”
Jenkins realized that the wing he’d evolved for the
Greenbird would be perfect on an ocean­going drone.
Its tail simplified the process of sailing so much that
even a robot could ­handle it. The bot would need only
three moving parts: the e ­ levator-like tab on the tail,
the rudder, and the free-­rotating wing itself. What’s
more, only two of those parts—the tail tab and the
rudder—would need power. A few off-the-shelf solar
panels would provide more than enough. Jenkins knew
from long experience that the fewer parts there were,
the fewer parts there were to break. His ocean­going
drone needed to be ­single-minded, bullet­proof, and
absolutely spartan.
It happened that Owens was working in the same
boat yard as Jenkins was, though on a different proj-
ect: writing software and building water­tight, salt-­
resistant, p­ ressure-tested controllers for a submarine
project. He too was daydreaming about building the
first around-the-world drone. Jenkins, a boatbuilder,
met Owens, a hacker, on the shop floor in April 2010,
and they quickly realized the obvious: They should quit

how
6
and came close to braining a helmet­less Jenkins. On the as you blast across it. No human sailor has reflexes fast their jobs and join forces.
maiden voyage of the Mark 4, the windward outrigger enough to keep up with wind that shifts second by sec-

saildrone
actually started to take off like a plane, nearly causing a ond. The fastest racing sailboats in the world use wings—
catastrophic capsize. “It is like gambling: It’s d ­ ouble or but they are still operated like sails, using ropes and
quits the whole time,” Jenkins says. pulleys and winches. Greenbird’s wing works totally

works
After four failed land-yacht designs, the situation was differently—it’s controlled by its tail, like the wing on
dire: The dry season was over. Zero resources. Every a plane. The Greenbird sails like an airplane flies, except
credit card but one maxed out. Jenkins had a decision that while the elevators on a plane’s tail send it climbing
to make. Wait in Australia for another year, until the The 6 technology secrets that float this up or gliding down, the tab on the Greenbird’s tail makes
next land-­sailing season? Or pack the land yacht into autonomous, ocean-­c rossing boat. —A.F. its wing pull left or right. It’s the same basic action,
a container bound for America and try there? He went just rotated 90 degrees.
to America, and in the spring of 2009, on a dry lake bed 1 The wing 2 T h e ta i l 3 The A hard wing on a free-­rotating mount is a much more
just south of Las Vegas, he piloted a wind-­powered sail counter- difficult thing to engineer than a mast—a ­simple pole
As wind passes A l­ ittle tab at weight
rocket called the Greenbird to 126 mph. over it, the the back of held up by guy wires—but the payoff is in the actual sail-
Jenkins was officially the fastest sailor in the world. wing produces the tail can be Positioned at ing. By severing all the ropes that run between the boat
Satisfying, yes. But after nearly a decade spent camp- thrust. That set to the left the end of a spar, and the sail on a normal yacht, a lot of the complexity of
force is con- or right, caus- it adjusts the
ing alone in the desert, he figured that what he had got- centrated on ing the wing wing’s equilib- sailing goes away. In a normal sailboat, every turn of the
ten from the experience was mostly adventure. “I was its axis of rota- to rotate a few rium so its cen- rudder turns the sail. Not so with a free-­rotating wing,
completely unaware that the wing technology I had tion, prevent- degrees and ter of gravity is which by its very nature is always correctly angled into
ing the wing maintain an balanced, allow-
evolved would be useful for anything except breaking from spinning efficient angle ing it to rotate the wind. Furthermore, dialing in the amount of sideways The two didn’t actually form a company until they
land-­sailing records,” he says. wildly. of attack. as needed. lift generated by the wing—thrust, in other words—is a got a kick in the ass: News broke that a ­startup called Liq-
The wing that Jenkins created for that final, success- matter of adjusting the e ­ levator-like tab on the back of uid Robotics had already launched an ocean­going drone.
ful land yacht had a tail. It’s not an obvious design. After 4 The 5 The 6 The Keel the tail. The Greenbird had only two controls: the steer- The company had developed a line of boats it called Wave
infographic by bryan christie design

all, most boats have soft sails, not hard wings. And even rudder
the sailboats that do have hard wings—like the $10 mil- While in theory
lion wingsailed racing catamarans that dueled in last it’s pos­sible to
year’s America’s Cup—don’t have tails. The tail was the operate Sail-
drone by using
breakthrough idea that got Jenkins in the record books, only the sail, it’s
it’s what got Saildrone to Hawaii, and it’s what has the more efficient
potential to disrupt a ­multitrillion-­dollar slice of the to use a r­ udder
to point the
global GDP. But to understand the genius of Jenkins’ tail, boat where you
it’s necessary to go back to first prin­ciples. want it to go.
autopilot ing wheel and what was, in effect, a ­throttle. Gliders, which harvest their energy from the up-and-
If Saildrone
GPS provides gets knocked By the time he captured the land-­sailing record, Jen- down movement of waves in the open sea. An armada of
speed data over, it will kins had racked up a pile of debt. To start working it four Wave Gliders set off from San Francisco in Novem-
and location. right itself off, he accepted an offer to move to San Francisco and ber 2011 to cross the Pacific for Australia. The goal: Make
That’s all Sail- because of the
drone needs to keel’s weight- help design a kite boat for ­Google cofounders Larry it into Guinness World Records for the longest journey
know. Naviga- ing. Its steep Page and Sergey Brin. It was interesting work, and he by an unmanned autonomous surface ­vehicle. It was a
tion instruc- angle sheds was introduced to a whole new scene, one where out- publicity stunt—Liquid Robotics, which at the time was
tions reach the debris like kelp
autopilot via and lost fish- there engineering projects like the self-­driving car and riding high on $36.5 million in VC funding, wanted some
satellite. ing nets. ­augmented-­reality glasses were the stuff of everyday press. It billed its invention as “the wheel for the ocean.”

1 0 9
 At first Owens thought that the wave-energy system
was a pretty neat technology. But the more he learned
about it, the less sense it made to him. Wave Glider’s
top speed was incredibly slow: 3 mph in the best con-
ditions. Too slow to get out of the way of bad weather,
too slow even to fight an ocean current like the Kuro-
shio or the Gulf Stream. And the wave-energy har-
vesting mechanism that hung beneath? It was full of
moving parts just waiting to get fouled by slime, kelp,
bar­nacles, and wayward fishing nets.
Jenkins was similarly unimpressed, not just
because Wave Glider was the stupidest thing he’d
ever seen, but because he couldn’t believe that any-
one would pay $36.5 million to develop the stupidest
thing he had ever seen. Then again, the payoff for the
­fastest-sailor-in-the-world thing had been exactly $0.
It was enough to make Jenkins reevaluate. Who exactly
was the stupid one here?
Jenkins, eager to let some hot air out of the Liq-
uid Robotics balloon, originally planned to send Sail-
drone chasing after Wave Gliders as they crept across
the Pacific. When the Wave Gliders launched, Jenkins
hadn’t even started building. Still, he knew that he was
five times faster and calculated that he could beat the
Wave Gliders to Australia even if he got a late start. But
by the time he was able to raise the necessary funds—
largely through a grant from the Marine Science and
Technology Foundation—the clock had run out. After
more than 300 days at sea, two Wave Gliders made it
to Australia. The other two broke down en route to
Japan; only one was recovered.
Saildrone may not have had a chance to best Liquid
Robotics on the water, but a head-to-head comparison
of the two companies is no contest. Liquid Robotics
is seven years old, employs 110 ­people, and has now
raised more than $77 million in venture capital. The
total bill for Saildrone, three years into the project,
including what Jenkins and Owens pay themselves
and their two helpers? “Less than $400,000,” says
Wendy Schmidt, wife of ­Google executive chair Eric
Schmidt. (The ­couple funds the Marine Science and
Technology Foundation.)
Schmidt regales me with stories of Jenkins’ incred­
ible talent for ­dollar-­stretching. “He obtained massive
amounts of ­carbon-fiber castoffs from his contacts in
the yachting industry; he bought a broken $25,000 mill-
ing machine on craigslist for $2,000 and fixed it him-
self; he sublet an 800-square-foot workshop and then
­doubled it by building another floor!” Schmidt says. “I
mean, who does that?”
“Poverty is the mother of invention,” Jenkins says, and
then he shows me the tail tab control—the t­ hrottle—
inside the Greenbird’s cockpit. It’s just a piece of string
connected to the tail by means of an antique fishing
reel. “My grandfather’s,” he says. “It was just ­cobbled
together out of parts I had.”
1 1
Armed with engineering studies that predict that Saildrone Jenkins announces to his staff of two—a boatbuilder
sails retrofitted onto Bay Area ferries would cut yearly has built a and a sander—that it’s time to go to the pub for the tra-
40-foot-high
fuel costs by 30 to 40 percent, Gardner ­managed to get test wing ditional Friday afternoon pint.
seed funding for a real-world ferry-wing test. When it that could Before Jenkins leaves the shed, he checks on the Honey
came time to actually spend that money, the choices help power Badger’s progress for the day. The odometer stands at
ferries in the
were to acquire and fix up a $10 million experimental San Francisco 6,000 nautical miles, but something looks wrong. Dig-
ferry wing that the Navy had partially built or to hire Bay and cut ging into the data he realizes that the sensor that mea-
Jenkins to build a scaled-up version of his Saildrone fuel costs by sures the rudder’s angle is sending random garbage to
as much as
wing for pennies on the Navy’s dollar. Going with Jen- 40 percent. Saildrone’s brain. Salt water must have somehow infil-
kins was not just a question of cost, however. Thanks trated the connection. “That was the last analog circuit
to the sail-with-a-tail design, his technology requires on the boat prone to corrosion,” Jenkins says, cursing
no knowledge of sailing to use. “You can have a but- himself for not having upgraded it. “The new version
ton that says ‘Turn off the wind assist,’ ” Gardner says. of the boat is all digital.”
The wing sail is 40 feet high, 10 feet across, and as Jenkins and Owens start sending commands to the
thick as a man is wide, but its fuel-­saving potential— drone and realize that all is not lost. Even without the
anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million per ferry per rudder, the wing should be able to steer it back to port.
year—must be verified by scientists from UC Berke- “It’s a long way from dead,” Jenkins says. Reviving the
ley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center. boat is a ­simple matter of swapping the old-style analog
They will be rolling it out of the shop, standing it up, and rudder encoder with the new-style digital encoder. The
The morning after the Honey Badger arrives in Hawaii, using a crane to mount it on a passenger-­carrying tri- only catch is that they’ll have to go to Hawaii to do it.
it’s time to send her out again. The new mission is to spin maran that will travel around the bay for three months. Another trip to Hawaii? The crew greets the news with
the odometer past 7,939 nautical miles and thus rob Liq- “It’s going to be awesome,” Jenkins says, his face turn- a chorus of clinking glasses: “Honey Badger don’t care.”
uid Robotics of its endurance record. Barefoot on the ing froggy. “We’re two weeks away from an erection.” And then they raise their pints high for their traditional
dock of the Kaneohe Yacht Club, Jenkins opens his iPad The ferry wing is just getting its finishing touches when toast. “Honey Badger don’t give a shit!” �
and drops a few new waypoints into the Honey Badger’s
brain—aiming it around the South Pole and toward the
equatorial Pacific. If successful, it will be the first drone
of any kind to “circumcise the world,” as Jenkins gleefully
puts it. It’s approximately 25,000 miles—10 times the dis-
tance to Hawaii—with no pit stops. What are the odds?
“It’s a long shot,” says Jenkins, who points out that Sail-
drone was designed to get to Hawaii, no more. “We cut a
lot of corners when we started,” Owens agrees, “because
we were paying for it out of our own pockets.” Hawaii
was the milestone that Schmidt wanted. “Every sailing
journey that I’ve ever been on has been a near disaster,”
says Jenkins, sipping his beer from the ­bottle. “We’ll see.”
A month later Jenkins and Owens are in their new shop
in Alameda, California. It’s cavernous—an acre of covered
space on a decommissioned Navy base—and littered with
all sorts of fun engineering projects in various stages of
completion. In a far corner is the Greenbird, now shod with
skates and being prepped for an eventual run at the ice-­
sailing record. Off to one side is the ­carbon-fiber shell of
a seaplane that Jenkins is building. Across one wall is the
beginning of a Saildrone production line. Orders are start-
ing to come in. But dominating the workshop and in the
center of everything is another wing, one far bigger than
the 20-foot-high drone wing, bigger even than the Green-
bird’s 28-foot-high wing. This one is the ­people mover.
The ferry wing is the culmination of six years of lobby-
ing by Jay Gardner, a self-­described “self-­employed hip-
pie” who operates a small boat-­charter company out of
San Francisco. The winds that blow through the Golden
Gate year-round, the 60-year-old Gardner says, “are the
closest thing to a ­perpetual-motion machine we’ve got.”
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