It's been a while since my last big post to the forum. Since then I've been working a lot to get more support for the project. The first thing you might notice is that NREC @ CMU is now listed on this website as an official sponsor. Thanks to the kind folks at Carnegie Mellon, they have given a green light to making their support public. I hope that this, along with their commitment to using OpenJAUS on new projects, will give a big boost to our reputation. It shows that the work we've done is now providing value to some of the most respected unmanned systems developers. I think this value will grow as we move toward an even more versatile implementation with SAE JAUS. We also have plans in the works to enhance the foundation of the OpenJAUS project, but I'll leave that discussion for another time...

The big announcement for today is that we will be entering the next phase in developing our new implementation. The primary focus of this time will be to begin structuring, stubbing and documenting the code base, and writing a lot of unit tests. Additionally, I'm sure that we will continue designing the system architecture and documenting it with diagrams and method of operation descriptions.

I want to enter this phase sooner than originally planned because the design discussions that we've had have been very abstract, and they mostly deal with new concepts outlined in SAE JAUS. Many of these concepts are foreign to even the most experienced JAUS developers, so by dealing with code directly, we'll hopefully be able to provide a reference frame for engineers to understand. This means that we will be creating a new repository on Google Code that will provide a home for the next gen system.

Please keep an eye on us, and get involved! SAE JAUS will be a critical requirement on upcoming government programs. Developing and using this software will provide a good head start to the organizations that wish to be competitive.