A Worcester Polytechnic Institute senior and his hometown friend are in the middle of an attempt at something that, as far as anyone can tell, has not been done before.
Their 12-foot, fully autonomous, solar-powered boat, called Scout, is now somewhere more than 1,000 miles off the coast of Rhode Island and heading, hopefully, to Spain. If Scout completes the voyage, she will be the first autonomous boat (i.e. unmanned and not remotely controlled) to cross the Atlantic.
The idea started, as most great and awful college ideas do, as a late-night joke between buddies.
One of the buddies was going away to Spain for a semester. The friends joked they should communicate through message-in-a-bottle. Being engineering students, they began devising how they might build a bottle that could actually make it across the Atlantic.
Almost three years and $6,000 later, WPI senior Dylan Rodriguez, 21, and his friend Max Kramers, a University of Rhode Island graduate, were on the beach in their hometown of Tiverton, Rhode Island seeing off their creation.
After a Kickstarter campaign raised $3,000, the pair went to work in a garage, building the boat and electronics. Gradually, friends from their coastal neighborhood, where just about everyone has sailing experience, were stopping by to help.
"It took longer than we thought, but I think everybody is glad it took so long and we learned so much," Rodriguez said. "We've all grown as friends."
Rodriguez said that when Scout took off he felt something like "parental pride." The metaphor holds up when you consider the team had to drop Scout off in the ocean and trust they had taught her enough to survive.
"We compare it to sending your kid off to college..." Rodriguez said. "You just have to give up control; in our case completely."
Scout is covered in solar panels, which power two batteries -- one to power the motor, the other for the boat's electronics. If the sun isn't shining and the batteries run out, the boat goes to sleep. The motor and rudder are Scout's only moving parts.
For navigation, the boat uses GPS for positioning and an electronic compass to determine which way it's pointed. Scout is programmed to travel to 61 waypoints, which keeps it on course from New England to the Iberian peninsula.
Since launch Scout has traveled an average of 30 miles per day. "Some days much better, some days much worse," Rodriguez said.
At that rate, the boat would hit land in about 77 days. While there are too many variables to say exactly what day - or even month - Scout will hit land, Rodriguez said he plans to be there when she does.
As of Friday, Oct. 4, Scout was 1,128 miles away from the coast, closer to the Azores than to Rhode Island. As far as anyone can tell, the previous record for an autonomous boat traveling the Atlantic was set by a group of Irish students. Their boat went 61 miles.
The trip hasn't gone perfectly. Several times now, the boat has "gone silent," that is, stopped sending signals about its location. The first few times lasted no more than 12 hours, until the team could reset their satellite tracking system.
But this time, Scout has been silent for four days. A backup tracker can give periodic updates, which tell Rodriguez and his friends the boat is still moving generally in the right direction. But, they say, it's impossible to know if that's a function of the wind and currents, which now would be pushing Scout east anyway, or if the boat is still traveling under its own power.
The boys wrote a message, in three languages, on the boat's hull in case it winds up somewhere other than the Spanish coast.
It says: "Hello I'm Scout, a fully autonomous boat attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Tiverton, Rhode Island, to Sanlucar de Barrameda, Spain. I was built over the course of three years by a group of young optimists after a successful Kickstarter campaign. If you have found me, please contact our ragtag group of aspiring engineers."
Rodriguez admits the silence is concerning, but he is stoic.
"She'll end up somewhere eventually," he said.