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Talk-01: iFrontSeat: A New Approach for Writing Extensible MOOS-IvP Frontseat-Backseat Payload Interface Drivers
Toby Schneider, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Broadly, our goal at LAMSS is to develop a autonomy,sensing, and communications infrastructure that can operate on a heterogeneous collection of vehicles by splitting the system into two components: the "frontseat" and "backseat" computing systems. The "frontseat" is provided by the vehicle manufacturer and is typically proprietary. It is responsible for low level control of the vehicle. The "backseat" runs the high level autonomy (typically the IvP Helm), sensing, and communications (typically Goby) components.
Not surprisingly, a piece of software is required to interface between the "frontseat" and the "backseat". Historically, a new interface has been written for each vehicle that was to be used with MOOS-IvP (For example, the applications iHuxley, iRecon, iOceanServerComms, ...). This led to a proliferation of approaches for handling the state transitions and control. In some cases, misunderstandings involving various aspects of MOOS-IvP have led to vehicle runaways. Furthermore, as MOOS-IvP becomes even more widely adopted and the number of manufacturers of robotic assets increases, it seems sensible to minimize the duplication of effort involved in writing interfaces.
iFrontSeat aims to address these problems by providing a single open source implementation of the connection to MOOS-IvP (the "backseat") while providing a structured well-defined extensible interface for writing different "frontseat" drivers. Currently, a driver has been developed and tested for the Bluefin Robotics family of AUVs. This talk will discuss the design of iFrontSeat with a focus on how to expand its use to a wide variety of vehicles.
Categories:
- Payload Autonomy Interface
- Vehicle Safety
- Bluefin Robotics