ROS-IvP: Porting the Interval Programming suite into the Robot Operating System for maritime autonomy

We present a set of software packages that integrates the arbitration framework, user interface utilities, and native vehicle behaviors found in the Mission-Oriented Operating Suite (MOOS-IvP) into the Robot Operating System. MOOS-IvP is prevalent in the maritime robotics community due to a large library of maritime-specific autonomy behaviors, interfaces to common unmanned underwater vehicles, utility programs, and the inclusion of a default arbitration framework for autonomous decision making. However, the Robot Operating System (ROS) has grown in use within the autonomy and robotics communities at large due to the utility of its communications framework, node introspection capabilities, and messaging architecture. In our work we combine the best capabilities of both robotics architectures into two packages for use in maritime autonomy applications. The packages allow introspection of the various components of the IvP autonomy framework and allow behaviors to be backwards-compatible with standard MOOS-IvP.