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Background of MOOS-IvP:
    MOOS was written by Paul Newman in 2001 to support operations with autonomous marine vehicles in the MIT Ocean Engineering and the MIT Sea Grant programs. At the time Paul was a post-doc working with John Leonard and has since joined the faculty of the Robotics Research Group at Oxford University. MOOS continues to be developed and maintained by Paul Newman at Oxford and the most current version can be found at Paul's website.   (The MOOS software available on this site is merely a subset of a snapshot of the MOOS code from Paul's page).

The IvP Helm was developed in 2004 for autonomous control on unmanned marine surface craft. It was written by Mike Benjamin as a post-doc working with John Leonard,   and as a research scientist for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport Rhode Island. The IvP Helm is a single MOOS process that uses a different behavior coordination technique (multi-objective optimization) than the helm originally distributed with MOOS. The earlier helm (pHelm) is still available from the Oxford website.

Sponsors of MOOS-IvP:
    Original development of MOOS and IvP were more or less by-products of other sponsored research in (mostly marine) robotics. Those sponsors were primarily The Office of Naval Research (ONR), as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).   MOOS and IvP are currently funded by Code 31 at ONR, Dr. Don Wagner and Dr. Behzad Kamgar-Parsi.

Early development of IvP benefited from the support of the In-house Laboratory Independent Research (ILIR) program at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport RI. The ILIR program is funded by ONR.

Acronyms:
    MOOS originally stood for "Minimal Odyssey Operating System" since the first platform it was written for was the Bluefin Oddysey III vehicle owned by MIT. As the name implied, it was meant to be as small and simple as possible. A short time later, as MOOS was used on other robotic platforms, the MOOS acronym became known as the "Mission Oriented Operating Suite".

IvP stands for "Interval Programming" which is a mathematical programming model for multi-objective optimization. The IvP model and algorithms are included in the IvP Helm software as the method for representing and reconciling the output of helm behaviors. The term interval programming was inspired by the well-known mathematical models of linear programming (LP) and integer programming (IP). The pseudo-acronym IvP was chosen to be distinct from these older and better known mathematical programming models.

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