Prev-Talk | Next-Talk | All-Talks | Talks-Sorted | MOOS-DAWG'26
Talk-15: The MOOS External Interface (MEI): Bridging MOOS-IvP with External Systems and ROS 2
Michael DeFilippo and Supun Randeni
MIT Dept of Mechanical Engineering, MIT Sea Grant
MOOS-IvP is a powerful autonomy framework for marine robotics, but integrating it with external systems operator tools, data pipelines, or other middleware stacks has historically required either direct use of the low-level MOOS comms API or the development of bespoke MOOS applications. The MOOS External Interface (MEI) addresses this gap by providing a clean, lightweight library for publishing and subscribing to a MOOS community from any external process, without requiring the application to be a MOOS app itself.
A primary motivation for MEI is enabling robust, production-quality interoperability between MOOS-IvP and ROS 2. Rather than running a monolithic bridge node, MEI allows ROS 2 nodes to interact with a live MOOS community directly subscribing to MOOS variables as ROS 2 topics and publishing commands back supporting hybrid architectures where perception, planning, and control components may span both frameworks. This has direct application to real-world deployments where ROS 2 sensor drivers, navigation stacks, or machine learning inference pipelines must operate alongside a MOOS-IvP helm.
Categories:
- USVs
- UUVs
- MOOS/ROS Interface