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Talk-21: pOctaver, adding a scripting language to MOOS

Arjan Vermeij, Thomas J. Pastore, NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC), Italy

NURC uses MOOS‐IvP in a scientific research and rapid prototyping environment. Contributions to the open‐source suite of MOOS‐IvP software is readily made by programmers adept at C++ programming. However, the utility of MOOS‐IvP’s benefits can be expanded to additional users who normally develop their work in Matlab.

Octave is an open source Matlab clone. We developed pOctaver, which can directly run a script written in Octave as a MOOS application. This has great advantages in allowing for rapid prototyping. A complex function or new concept developed and preliminarily tested in matlab can be quickly inserted into an existing moos mission for system‐level simulation. The subsequent step from simulation in the MOOS environment to running on the vehicle follows immediately. The cycle from developing a concept and testing it in matlab to running it on a vehicle can be reduced to hours or minutes, as contrasted with a timeline normally measured in days or longer if a conversion from matlab code to C++ were required. pOctaver is a path by which a researcher can test a new function or application without requiring a single line of C‐code to be written.

Of course there is always a place for well‐written and computationally more efficient C++ programs, and Octave/Matlab can never compete with C++ if computation times are critical. The advantage of pOctaver from an organizational standpoint is that the efforts of the researchers and programmers can be decoupled and are no longer serially dependent prior first in‐water test of a new concept.

The design and implementation of pOctaver will be discussed, along with examples of how it has been used at NURC in recent months.

Related Material:

A reprint of this presentation, including the pOctaver source files, will be available from NURC after the conference. Please contact the NURC Public InformationOfficer at pio@nurc.nato.int, and request document NURC-PR-2010-002 entitled "pOctaver, adding a scripting language to MOOS" by Arjan Vermeij and Thomas J. Pastore. Optionally, you may request the file through your national representative. See http://www.nurc.nato.int/publications/distribution.htm for details.

Categories:

  • Octave/Matlab
  • MOOS-IvP
  • Govt Labs