Virtual Race Management System for Formula Kite Using Local Networks and GPS-Based Rule Execution

Formula Kite racing combines high boat speeds, compact race courses, crowded starts, and rapid tactical decisions. Conventional race management relies on committee vessels, physical buoys, dedi- cated timing equipment, radio coordination, and increasingly cloud-connected tracking services. Such infrastructure is often inaccessible to local clubs, high-school and university teams, training groups, and emerging Formula Kite programs. This paper presents a conference-level research design for a Virtual Race Management System (VRMS) developed around a Raspberry Pi race server, iPhone client application, Apple Watch companion interface, local Wi-Fi networking, and GPS-based rule ex- ecution. The system replaces selected physical course infrastructure with GPS-defined virtual marks and executes automatable race-management functions locally, including course distribution, start syn- chronization, OCS candidate detection, virtual mark rounding validation, finish detection, automatic ranking, and auditable log collection. Treating Koki Goto—a Japanese high-school student, Formula Kite athlete, national championship winner, international competitor, and independent developer of low-cost sailing technologies—as the primary system designer, the paper frames VRMS as both an engineering contribution and a sports-informatics research platform. We provide mathematical mod- els for local geodetic projection, virtual marks, signed-distance start-line geometry, GPS uncertainty propagation, probabilistic OCS classification, course-completion validation, and ranking generation. We further specify rule-engine abstractions, state-machine models, pseudocode algorithms, reliability mechanisms, and an experimental methodology for evaluating accuracy, latency, battery consump- tion, setup time, scalability, and operational robustness. The central claim is not that all Racing Rules of Sailing can be automated, but that low-cost edge computing and uncertainty-aware GPS reasoning can reduce race-management cost while preserving human authority for judgment-heavy decisions.