OpenJAUS driving the Adoption of JAUS

A quality, open-source JAUS implementation is essential for the education of interested parties, and ultimately widespread acceptance and adoption of the JAUS specification. The JAUS specification only dictates the message set, not the protocol between components. In assessing the value of the JAUS specification, seeing a complete implementation, including example components is very helpful.

OpenJAUS Development Group Charter

This charter documents the initial intent, goals, and operating procedures of the OpenJAUS development group. The primary purpose of the OpenJAUS Project is to provide a functional, high quality, and free open source implementation of the JAUS specifications. The implementation will be written, licensed and distributed in a manner such that it will be useful to a large user base. Anyone is welcome to participate in and contribute to the Project. Instructions on how to contribute will be presented clearly on the Project web site.

The goals of the OpenJAUS project group are as follows:

• Facilitate the adoption of the JAUS standard amongst newly interested parties.
• Provide a free implementation to the larger JAUS community, with a focus on correctness, portability and readability and which may be used as an educational tool.
• Support interoperability amongst JAUS systems through a common implementation.
• Foster open source collaboration on JAUS applications and provide a home or sounding board for such open source projects.

The intent of the group is to provide a core set of open source products that include the following:

• A JAUS message and data structure library, which is complete and consistent with the JAUS Reference Architecture, and also includes up to date implementations of any experimental activities of the JAUS Working Group.
• A Node Manager and corresponding Interface library that allows messages in the above library to be exchanged on familiar communications interfaces.
• One or more templates which facilitate the implementation of JAUS components using the libraries and interfaces of the above two products.

The project will also provide hosting, and support for other related open source projects, such as implementations of components, and operator control units, that are outside of the core products.

OpenJAUS History

Prior to 2005 - The Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics (CIMAR) at the University of Florida has a strong history of contribution to the JAUS standard. Research at CIMAR is focused around using JAUS to control several autonomous ground vehicles. UF Professor Dr. Carl Crane coordinates these efforts at CIMAR.

Spring 2005 - University of Florida graduate students Tom Galluzzo, Danny Kent, and Bob Touchton begin working on a JAUS message library and node manager implementation for use in the 2^nd DARPA Grand Challenge.

Fall 2005 - Team CIMAR enters "The NaviGator" vehicle into the DARPA Grand Challenge. The NaviGator uses the developed JAUS implementation to successfully exchange millions of messages through its distributed computing system.

Spring 2006 - The UF JAUS implementation is successfully tested and integrated with other commercial grade implementations during the JAUS OCU and Payloads Committee (OPC) experiment 3.0. The implementation proves to be interoperable with multiple robotic systems.

Summer 2006 - UF decides to release their code as open source and combines efforts with Brian Prodoehl and Alex Gizis of Nomadio Inc. to create the OpenJAUS project. The UF implementation is renamed OpenJAUS and is released online. It is immediately adopted by several commercial and academic organizations.

Fall 2007 - Work begins on the next generation of OpenJAUS. To coincide with the latest JAUS Reference Architecture version 3.3, the planned release is dubbed OpenJAUSv3.3.

Spring 2008 - OpenJAUS developers work with a closed beta testing group from academia and industry to: develop a new C/C++ node manager, improve the JAUS message library, and develop a simplified component framework library.

Summer 2008 - OpenJAUSv3.3 is released and gains immediate attention of the robotics community.