Ada, the little robot, is in trouble.

Waves crash over her bow and lines cry out in the wind. A wave rises up behind Ada and she is carried up with it. For a moment, she sits at the peak of the wave, motionless in the heart of the violent Atlantic. The moment ends and she careens down its face, moving faster than she was ever designed to. The wave yanks at her rudder, straining it further and further to the side. Just as Ada is about to bottom out, there is a loud snap.

The rudder has failed.

Ada can’t steer.

She’s 8,500 kilometres from home, 14 days away from Europe, stranded and no one is coming to help her.

She’s on her own.

Taking the Atlantic

The UBC SailBot team designed and built Ada, a fully autonomous sailboat, known as a "sailbot." Ada is named after Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the 1800s. The team is made up of about 60 UBC undergraduate students who work on Ada as volunteers.

In 2004, several UBC students, led by Erik Berzins, didn't want to build the human-powered submarine they were tasked with for their capstone project. They convinced their professor to let them start a design team and built a sailboat instead. The club competed in its first competition in 2006.

Several years later, a group of young engineers — known as the Original Team — picked up the mantle of UBC SailBot. The Original Team, composed of Kristoffer Vik Hansen, Neil Dobie, David Lee, Adrian Granchelli, Karry Ocean, Dave Tiessen, Michael Schnetzler, Greg Wong and Josh Andrews, among others, took the previously designed boat and gave it a major facelift to compete in the International Robotic Sailing Competition in 2012 — a competition that was inspired by the success of the capstone project.

The UBC team won the event in 2012 and in 2013, when they became the first to earn a perfect score. They released most of their design so that other teams could learn from it to improve their boats and level the playing field. They returned to the competition in 2014 with the same boat they had used in 2013 and won the competition.

“That was our signal that we are in a league of our own and this competition was too small for us,” said Youssef Basha, a graduating electrical engineer who has spent the last four years with UBC SailBot. “So we decided we were going to take the Atlantic.”

Don Martin, a Vancouver based yacht designer and advisor to the SailBot team, helped the team design Ada’s hull — but he played a much larger role in Ada’s life than just the design.

In 2013, Martin and Hansen had a conversation after winning their second competition in a row with a perfect score — they needed a bigger challenge. The two came up with the idea to cross the Atlantic and the idea for Ada was born.

By late 2013, UBC SailBot had been throwing around the idea of ditching competitions to focus on the Atlantic for a while. An email thread solidified the idea and the team got back to work.

The competition boat — TB2013 — was only two metres long. The team would need a bigger boat. While the team could use what they learned from competing and apply it to Ada, the boat needed a massive upgrade if it was going to make a transatlantic journey.

Getting to work

It’s the fall semester of 2013 and SailBot has just committed to crossing the Atlantic — 100 per cent autonomously.

No one on the team has ever sailed across the Atlantic — the journey is a black hole. The challenges that face them remain a mystery. With no idea of the hardships their boat will face crossing the ocean, the engineers are at a loss of where to start.

The leaves have just started to fall on campus and the winter rains have yet to set in. The sun is setting behind the Engineering Design Centre as 70 undergraduate engineers file into the building after their last Monday lecture. The team piles into the centre, grabbing a seat in front of a projector. Hansen, the team captain at the time, starts a presentation on the team’s progress and what needs to be done next.

Over the next three years, the team will spend every Monday evening at team meetings and every Saturday at the Rusty Hut, the engineering workshop, at subteam work parties. They will be meeting with and interviewing sailors, engineers, boat designers, teachers and adventurers to learn everything they can about sailing, sailboats and the the open ocean.

► Play video Video Work Party - March 30, 2014 SailBot building Ada's hull.

The task at hand

UBC SailBot, which fluctuates between 60 and 70 undergrad members depending on the year, is broken up into three subteams. Each of the three subteams — mechanical, electrical and software — tackled one aspect of Ada. The team captain oversees all three subteams. The mechanical team was tasked with, among other things, designing and building the hull and sail. The electrical team is responsible for sensors and power. The software team write Ada’s brain — coding her how to steer, navigate and sail.

The teams work independently much of the time, but are in constant communication. Ada isn’t a hull, a sensor and some code — three stacks of technology. She is one integrated, intelligent and sophisticated robotic sailbot with a life of her own. She needs to be 100 per cent autonomous. The team puts her in the water, tells her where to sail and lets her go — no remote control, instructions or humans on board.

I kissed a girl and I liked it

On Saturdays, the team would arrive at Rusty Hut at 9 a.m., trudging through the cold autumn rain to meet with their subteams. About 15 to 20 team members fill the workspace until 1 p.m., when the second crew came to replace them. The second team worked until 5 p.m. — sometimes late into the night.

The first few months saw members gathering around tables, laptops illuminating their faces. Before the team can build anything, they must first research and design the vessel.

By early 2014, the Rusty Hut is bustling with the sounds of construction, forcing the software team to flee and find refuge in the quieter Design Centre.

The mechanical team, lead by Neil Dobie and Dave Tiessen, began with the hull. Not only would the hull have to be completed first so that the rest of Ada can be built onto it, they would only have one shot at building it. Since electronics, sensors, batteries and the rest of the mechanical parts will be placed in and on the hull, once it’s done, it’s done.

While five or so engineers huddled around the hull, sanding its edges to perfection, a team of five electrical members clustered over a table at the side of the workshop — fiddling with a sensor or battery. The team was tasked with providing power to Ada, the hardware of her brain and all of the sensors to guide her on the 3,300 kilometre crossing.

A few members of the team worked in the office in the Rusty Hut, continuing to research and design for the adventure ahead.

Down the street, the software subteam pushed together a group of tables and set to typing, building Ada’s intelligence one line of code at a time. The subteam is dependent on the hardware the mechanical and electrical teams install on the boat, and must work on code for functions Ada may never have. Members of the team devote thousands of hours into code that could get cut hours before launch.

At this point, the team is still over a year and a half away from launch, but they are hard at work to the ritualistic soundtrack of movie scores, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Imagine Dragons. The music floats out of the Rusty Hut and into the Vancouver drizzle.

When Youssef Basha says, “The hull was built half to war music and half to ‘I Kissed a Girl,’” it’s no joke.