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Talk-09: Building MOOS Enabled GUIs for Mission Monitoring and Control

Alberto Grati, Arjan Vermeij, NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC)

The NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) operates two unmanned surface marine vehicles as research platforms for port protection and naval mine countermeasures programmes. Both of them are running the MOOS-IvP software suite in order to provide researchers with a unified approach to autonomy. During the last two years, mission profiles for the above platforms included the transmission to shoreside from different onboard payloads of real time data (including SONAR images) to let the operator monitor and control the progress of the mission through different stages. This led to the need of some software frameworks to easily build C++ GUIs and connect graphical objects (widgets) to MOOS variables, with minimal changes in the structure of the application itself with respect to the classical MOOSApp based model.

Two approaches are presented: one focused on desktop applications using the Qt libraries, and another based on the Wt libraries to render the GUI through a web browser, which enables non-MOOS devices to take part in the command and control chain. The former approach gives the programmer complete control over the layout and functionality of the GUI. The latter is easier to set up, also by non-programmers, but is more limited in its functionality. Both solutions are based on the NurcMoosApp class and plug file system, widely used among the NURC’s programmers community.

This presentation gives details about the technical solutions adopted, examples showing simple GUI creation, and a few real world applications developed using those frameworks that will be used during the forthcoming GLINT-11 and ANT-11 sea trials.

A reprint of this presentation, including the source code, will be made available through NURC, after the conference.

Categories:

  • Autonomy / Collaborative Autonomy
  • MOOS-IvP
  • Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) / Autonomous Surface Craft (ASCs)
  • Port Protection
  • Mine Countermeasures