Mirabaud Bol d'Or 2019

L'HEPIA, NOUVEAU PARTENAIRE DE LA MANIFESTATION
BOM: A TESTING
GROUND FOR
APPLIED RESEARCH
The Bol d’Or Mirabaud has teamed up this year
with HEPIA, the Geneva School of Engineering,
Architecture and Landscape, which will be developing
several technological solutions.
With some 500 boats, the Bol d’Or Mirabaud
needs to be at the cutting edge of technology,
particularly regarding communications and applying
the rules. Always eager to improve their services,
the organisers have turned to a local tech player
for modern solutions appropriate to various technical
aspects of the competition. HEPIA is already
shaping up as an ideal partner. “With our departments
of Building & Environment, Life Science,
Industrial Technology and Information Engineering
& Technology, the institution is very able to cover
multidisciplinary issues”, explains Gilles Triscone,
the school’s head of Research Coordination.
Three lines of research
Everyone at the SNG (Geneva Yacht Club) is
delighted with this collaboration as it also offers
the event a teaching dimension. “Our idea has been
to offer students participative projects”, explains
Rodolphe Gautier, president of the Bol d’Or
Mirabaud Organizing Committee. And he continues,
“These projects must both benefit the event and
provide tangible experience for the students. Our
medium-term objective is to find technical solutions
which enable us to expand our horizons, at
reasonable cost.”
The partners quickly grasped the range of potential
challenges and improvements, agreeing on three
main areas of focus. The first concerns the start,
for which a simple scorecard no longer suffices.
3
The second aims to guarantee
wi-fi coverage across the
whole of the Petit Lac section
to facilitate transmission of
images to the media. And the
last objective is accurate and
automatic logging of boats
rounding the Bouveret mark.
Unusual research
area
The 2019 BOM will focus
primarily on data acquisition
and testing. Two drones
hovering above the starting
line will take orthophotos
for comparison with data
collected by the beacons.
RFID (radio-frequency identification)
tags to record when
boats pass the buoys will
also be tested. “The challenge
of the system will be its
remote operation, since these
modules usually function with
a receiver placed 2-3 metres
away. There are several areas
to investigate and perfect if
we are to guarantee that a
boat’s passage will be logged
reliably from tens of metres
away.” Once installed, the
system must facilitate the
work of the spotters on the
Bouveret barge when boats
arrive grouped, particularly at
night or in bad weather.
Powerful directional wi-fi
antennas as well as passive
high-gain antennas will also be
deployed at strategic spots to
increase network coverage
of the Petit Lac and allow live
feeds, which will obviously
benefit the media.
To this end, all the school’s
departments will be asked to
contribute their know-how.
The architects are for
#BOM19 Bol d'Or Mirabaud 2019 47