Yep, we’ve done that.

Our History

OpenJAUS is the leading source for JAUS-compliant middleware for unmanned systems. Founded in 2006, OpenJAUS can trace it roots to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge as graduate students Bob Touchton, Danny Kent and Tom Galluzzo were tasked with developing a JAUS compliant architecture for use with the DARPA Grand Challenge entry from the University of Florida.

Drawing on several years of JAUS experience at the time, the students developed an SDK for use by the half dozen graduate students working on the project. In October 2005 the NaviGATOR vehicle traveled about 18 miles on the grand challenge course before being disabled. The JAUS software continued to run for the next 12 hours in standby, with logs from that day showing over 12 million JAUS messages transmitted amongst the nine JAUS nodes on the system.

In 2006, the OpenJAUS codebase was publicly released for the first time under a BSD License. Based on the software developed at the University of Florida, OpenJAUS 1.0 saw adoption by a number of companies looking to fulfill JAUS requirements. In the summer of 2008 OpenJAUS held its first Developer’s Conference in conjunction with the release of OpenJAUS 3.3. This was based on the then current JAUS Reference Architecture version 3.3 and included a number of suggestions from OpenJAUS users such as a C++ version of the Node Manager, better service connection support, and a more concise and robust component template.

In 2010, OpenJAUS LLC was formed by Danny Kent and Tom Galluzzo as the corporate entity to maintain, improve and advance the OpenJAUS platform. The JAUS standard had undergone a number of significant changes and the need for a new SDK based on this new flavor of JAUS (often referred to as SAE JAUS) was clear. OpenJAUS LLC took ownership of that challenge and began development of OpenJAUS 4.0 as a completely new and robust solution to the challenges and opportunities presented by SAE JAUS. OpenJAUS 4.0 is completely re-written from the ground up based on Model Driven Development (MDD). OpenJAUS 4.0 was released publicly in early summer 2011.

Dr. Nicholas Johnson, Chief Technical Officer (CTO)

Dr. Johnson leads OpenJAUS’ focus on developing software to facilitate interoperability between robotic systems. He has served on the JAUS working group helping to develop a standard for communication between unmanned systems and has over 10 years of experience working on numerous ground vehicles and software frameworks using this standard. He also has over 15 years of experience in software development ranging from low-level embedded devices to user facing applications and high-level algorithms. Nicholas holds a PhD in Robotics from the University of Florida where his research focused on Simultaneous Localization, Mapping, and Object Tracking using multiple 2D Laser Scanners. He also holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Howard University.

Dr. Tom Galluzzo, Advisor

Dr. Galluzzo is a Robotics Engineer and Vice President of OpenJAUS. He previously was a Senior Robotics Engineer at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) at Carnegie Mellon University. There he worked on robotic manipulation and control as part of the DARPA ARM-S program. Prior to NREC, Dr. Galluzzo served as a robotics engineer for Harris Corporation Mechatronics where he led internal research projects for autonomous robotic manipulation systems and haptic robotic manipulation control systems. Additionally Dr. Galluzzo has led the design and development of several autonomous vehicle systems. He has worked with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) robotics group, supporting the development of perimeter security autonomous ground vehicles. He competed in both the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge events, where he served as the lead systems integrator, navigation and controls engineer. In 2006 Dr. Galluzzo co-founded OpenJAUS, a leading software implementation of the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) that is used worldwide. He has led the development of OpenJAUS architecture and implementation, as well as advancement of the JAUS standard itself. Dr. Galluzzo was the document sponsor for the published JAUS Mobility Service Set (AS6009) standard.