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The cutting edge of AUV development focuses on the major components of navigation and decision-making, but there is a "long tail" of development required for the simpler applications that support them. These minor components perform very mundane tasks and consume very few resources, yet require a measurable amount of development time -- time that is taken away from actual innovation. We provide a framework for rapid development of these minor applications -- allowing the functionality of MOOS to be scripted -- though a language specially suited to that purpose: Lua. This framework allows MOOS applications to be expressed in far fewer lines of code with much better "syntactic sugar" for accessing settings and MOOS messages, ultimately enabling a much faster and more productive development cycle. Additionally, we show how Lua can be used to enhance the runtime configuration of MOOS applications: improving the simplicity, manageability, and power of the configuration system.
DOWNLOAD the brief given at MOOS-DAWG'11.