The MAUV/CoDA Project
Organization and Reorganization of
Autonomous Oceanographic Sampling Networks
Last modified: Thu Jun 5 16:48:20 EDT 2003
Welcome to the home page for the MAUV/CoDA project, a joint project of the
University of Maine's Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving
(CDPS) research group and The Autonomous Undersea Systems
Institute (AUSI).
Announcements
- 05 June 2003: Documentation for the most recent version of the
simulator, incorporating changes motivated by the CoDA<->CADCON
Project, is available here.
- 16 June 2000: A new version of the CoDA simulator is available in our public directory. This version is 3.0, and includes an
experiment harness for running multiple experiments.
- Documentation for version 3.0 of the simulator is also available in HTML, PostScript, or PDF forms.
Project Description
MAUV (Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) is the old name for the overall
project, and CoDA (Cooperative Distributed AOSN control) is the name for UM's
portion of the project. MAUV/CoDA is funded by the Office of Naval Research
(by grant N001-14-96-1-5009 and ONR/DEPSCoR grant N00014-98-1-0648).
Principal investigators at UM are Roy
M. Turner and Elise H. Turner. The PI at AUSI is D. Richard Blidberg
MAUV/CoDA focuses on controlling autonomous oceanographic sampling networks
(AOSNs). An AOSN is a collection of AUVs and other instrument platforms that
cooperate to collect data from an area of interest in the ocean. Sampling can
be distributed, allowing a 3-D "snapshot" of an area to be obtained, something
difficult or impossible to obtain any other way. The platforms are networked
together via acoustic modems (for underwater communication) and/or radio (for
communication at the ocean surface), so that they can coordinate their
sampling activities and report their results. The system is designed to be
autonomous, thus freeing scientists and human controllers from needing to
maintain an on-site presence and allowing the AOSN to remain on-station for
long periods of time. In effect, an AOSN can function as a set of "underwater
satellites" for collecting 4-D data.
To see a diagram of an AOSN, click here.
To see a VRML world showing an AOSN, click here.
Papers available on-line:
Out of date -- for a complete list, see the MaineSAIL publications page.
Other papers:
- A constraint-based approach to assigning system components to tasks
(E.H. Turner and R.M. Turner). To appear in Proceedings of the
11th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications
of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA--98--AIE),
Benicassim, Spain, June, 1998.
- Organization and reorganization of autonomous oceanographic sampling
networks (R.M. Turner and E.H. Turner). To appear in Proceedings
of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation, Leuven, Belgium, May, 1998.
Talks/Slides:
- Viewgraphs from an invited
briefing given at the 1998 NPS Modeling and Simulation Workshop, January
15, 1998, in Monterey, CA. The talk was titled: MAUV Project AOSN
Simulator.
- Viewgraphs from a talk given at
the Office of Naval Research, summer, 1997.
- Viewgraphs from a talk
given to colleagues at Penn State, Oct 17, 1996.
Simulator:
The source code for our simulator is available on-line in our public directory. The simulator is distributed as a gzip'd
tar file. The simulator is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
To run the simulator, you will need a Unix machine, a copy of the CLIPS rule-based system
(version 6 or later), and a copy of Allegro
Common Lisp. Other Lisps may work; we haven't tried it out using them.
A user manual (such as it is) and a description of the simulator is also
available in both HTML and PostScript versions.
NOTE: Some of the code that may be posted here from time to time is
copyrighted by others, in particular NASA (for CLIPS code). Please respect
the rights of these copyright owners!
Current files of interest are:
Related organizations:
Documentation:
Roy Turner, rmt@umcs.maine.edu