MOOS - Mission Orientated Operating Suite

TLDR

The paper presents a simple, extensible software suite for mobile robotic research. MOOS is an umbrella term for a set of libraries and applications designed to facilitate research in the mobile robotic domain. MOOS, an acronym for Mission Oriented Operating Suite, offers low‑level multi‑platform communications, dynamic control, high‑precision navigation, path planning, concurrent mission task arbitration, logging, and playback, and the paper details its philosophy, design, implementation, and core processes. The suite’s processes form a resilient, distributed, and coordinated system suitable for in‑field deployment of sub‑sea and land research robots.

Abstract

This paper is about simple to use, extensible software for mobile robotic research. It is concerned with a project called MOOS – an acronym for Mission Oriented Operating Suite. MOOS is an umbrella term for a set of libraries and applications designed to facilitate research in the mobile robotic domain. The spectrum of functionality provided ranges over low-level, multi-platform communications, dynamic control, high precision navigation and path planning, concurrent mission task arbitration and execution, mission logging and playback. The first part of the paper describes the underlying philosophy of MOOS and the resulting perceived benefits. The work then moves on to describe the details of the design and implementations of core system components. There then follows a set of high level descriptions of principal mission-oriented MOOS processes. Collectively these processes constitute a resilient, distributed and coordinated suite of software suitable for in-the-field deployment of sub-sea and land research robots.