Monday, July 27, 2009

AUVSI 2009 International Aerial Robotics Competition Videos and JAUS





These videos show the performance of the MIT team's entry for the 5th mission of the IARC. In this mission the goal is to fly into a building and locate an LED and send back an image of the control panel.

I think one of the biggest benefits of this is in pushing JAUS as an interoperability protocol. There are huge benefits for everyone if all autonomous vehicles can talk the same language.

A standard telemetry and control protocol would prevent robotics developers from continually rebuilding the wheels for visualization, logging and control.

Unfortunately, the Unmanned Systems and Robotics Interoperability Center has some unfortunate licensing terms for their standards.

"I understand that these SAE standards are copyrighted materials
that are provided solely for my use in preparing for this
competition. I agree to use the standards solely with my vehicle
design team and that I will not give these standards or copies of
them to anyone outside my design team."


I am going to try to contact them about releasing the JAUS standards. Otherwise, it is probably worth considering the requirements for a telemetry and control protocol for people building their own UAVs and ground robots. At minimum it should support a high density format for transmission via ham radio where bandwidth is at a premium, and a more flexible TCP/IP based protocol where bandwidth is plentiful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

All of the JAUS standards documents are available to anyone for purchase from SAE. (google "SAE AS-4" for the related working group)

However, detailed knowledge of the standard isn't going to be as important to widespread adoption as working code is. I recommend looking for open source implementations, such as OpenJAUS. Not only will that get your JAUS-compliant project up and going faster, but you can probably figure out the standard's specifics just by reading the code (and examples).

I Heart Robotics said...

Thanks, I managed to find that information a bit later. I still think free and open standards are the only way to go but the current situation with paying for the standards is not completely unreasonable.

I am looking at implementing some things with OpenJAUS to get an idea as to how well JAUS is going to work as a standard.