( Bluefield)—As Bluefield State College’s team of nine students and advisors busily prepared their autonomous ground vehicle, “Anassa II,” for the recent Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC), they realized they would need to meet a new requirement to compete. They had to make Anassa II “Joint Unmanned Autonomous System-compatible,” so that its communication systems could work together in a coordinated fashion.
For help, they turned to the Pittsburgh, PA-based organization, re², Inc. (pronounced re-squared). “We couldn’t have become JAUS-compliant without them,” noted Bruce Mutter, vice president/operations for the Center for Applied Research and Technology (CART, Inc.) at BSC. “There is a significant amount of programming involved in meeting the JAUS requirement. Their software program is particularly strong in the area of documentation instructions among the code. JAUS student team members led by Josh Eerenburg, Jesse Farmer, and John Browning focused on JAUS-compliance under the direction of faculty advisor Dr. Robert Riggins.”
CART served as an advanced prototype test for re²’s “JAUS Software Development Kit 1.0,” which is designed to serve as a standardized protocol for robots and their parts to communicate with each other. “Thus, if two robots from different vendors both speak JAUS, it’s easier for parts to be interchanged and for a central control system to communicate with both vehicles,” he added. “And, robots using JAUS are adaptable to other markets.”
As long ago as the late 1990s, the Department of Defense mandated that its unmanned vehicles use the JAUS system to reduce costs by ensuring that these vehicles “speak the same language.” However, use of the system has grown slowly, and the international standards body for the Society of Automotive Engineers has only recently adopted it
“Our selection for a beta test demonstrates the defense industry’s growing confidence in CART,” Mutter observed. “And it puts our students in the center of the latest communications’ body of knowledge for unmanned systems.”
BSC/CART finished fifth overall among 41 autonomous robotic vehicles entered in this year’s IGVC event, and was one of only a few vehicles that was JAUS-compatible at the competition.
July 13, 2006
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