An autonomous sailboat robot is a boat that only uses the wind on its sail as the propelling force, without remote control or human assistance to achieve its mission. Robotic sailing offers the potential of long range and long term autonomous wind propelled, solar or wave-powered carbon neutral devices. Robotic sailing devices could contribute to monitoring of environmental, ecological, meteorological, hydrographic and oceanographic data. These devices can also be used in traffic monitoring, border surveillance, security, assistance and rescue. The dependency on changing winds and sea conditions presents a considerable challenge for short and long term route and stability planning, collision avoidance and boat control. Building a robust and seaworthy sailing robot presents a truly complex and multi-disciplinary challenge for boat designers, naval architects, systems/electrical engineers and computer scientists. Over the last decade, several events such as Sailbot, World Robotic Sailing Championship and the International Robotic Sailing Conference (WRSC/IRSC) and Microtransat have sparked an explosion in the number of groups working on autonomous sailing robots. Many of the challenges in building truly autonomous sailing robots still remain unsolved. These proceedings present the work of researchers on current and future challenges in autonomous sailboat development, presented at the WRSC/IRSC 2014 in Galway, Ireland, 8th – 12th September 2014.

An autonomous sailboat robot is a boat that only uses the wind on its sail as the propelling force, without remote control or human assistance to achieve its mission. Robotic sailing offers the potential of long range and long term autonomous wind propelled, solar or wave-powered carbon neutral devices. Robotic sailing devices could contribute to monitoring of environmental, ecological, meteorological, hydrographic and oceanographic data. These devices can also be used in traffic monitoring, border surveillance, security, assistance and rescue. The dependency on changing winds and sea conditions presents a considerable challenge for short and long term route and stability planning, collision avoidance and boat control. Building a robust and seaworthy sailing robot presents a truly complex and multi-disciplinary challenge for boat designers, naval architects, systems/electrical engineers and computer scientists. Over the last decade, several events such as Sailbot, World Robotic Sailing Championship and the International Robotic Sailing Conference (WRSC/IRSC) and Microtransat have sparked an explosion in the number of groups working on autonomous sailing robots. Many of the challenges in building truly autonomous sailing robots still remain unsolved. These proceedings present the work of researchers on current and future challenges in autonomous sailboat development, presented at the WRSC/IRSC 2014 in Galway, Ireland, 8th - 12th September 2014.

Recon?gurable computing (RC) systems have generated considerable interest in the embedded and high-performance computing communities over the past two decades, with ?eld programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as the leading techn- ogy at the helm of innovation in this discipline. Achieving orders of magnitude performance and power improvements using FPGAs over traditional microp- cessorsis not uncommon for well-suitedapplications. But even with two decades of research and technological advances, FPGA design still presents a subst- tial challenge and often necessitates hardware design expertise to exploit its true potential. Although the challenges to address the design productivity - sues are steep, the promise and the potential of the RC technology in terms of performance, power, size, and versatility continue to attract application design engineers and RC researchers alike. The International Symposium on Applied Recon?gurable Computing (ARC) aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of RC systems with an emphasis on practical applications and design methodologies of this promising technology. This year's ARC symposium (The sixth ARC symposium) was held in Bangkok, Thailand during March 17-19, 2010, and attracted papers in three primary focus areas:RC applications, RC architectures, and RC design meth- ologies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, ARC 2009, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in March 2009.

The 21 full papers and 21 short papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from about 100 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on FPGA security and bitstream analysis, fault tolerant systems, architectures, place and route techniques, cryptography, and resource allocation and scheduling, as well as on applications.