Data communication in unmanned systems using joint architecture

Unmanned systems offers cost effective and high quality work to perform in dangerous or heavy tasks. Also they can perform repetitive tasks with high ratio of success. These benefits of robots can be summarized as mostly in productivity, safety, and in saving time and money. As a result robotic industry produces more unmanned systems to market. Many on these robotic systems are unable to operate and interact with each other. Communication rules are the most needed component for data to travel one source to destination. Also it's recommended that all the computer systems communicate through the same data structure. So that clients could start communication with each other by using the same software. In computer world the most common communication protocol is TCP/IP (Transmit Control Protocol / Internet Protocol). In addition today unmanned systems can use that TCP/IP protocol to communicate between operator and the control unit. Using this TCP/IP communication method developers and researchers create different types of data structures. Between these different unmanned systems the common and simple communication cannot be established. JAUS (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems) can solve these limitations and provide all unmanned systems in a domain to communicate with each other and become interoperability. The maintain interoperability to components of a system, predefined rules and standard addressing must be used. JAUS provides a communication framework to reduce life-cycle costs. Reusable components are defined as object orientated method. This method reduces the maintenance costs and allow to develop and improve the unmanned robotic system. Also this makes possible to insert the newer technologic hardware into JAUS system. JAUS system designed to be modular and scalable. To integrate our system to support JAUS there are number of terms to understand. These terms are system, subsystem, node, component and instance. A system is a logical grouping of unmanned systems in a domain. In a system all unmanned systems and operator control units that share common applications. A subsystem could able to perform one unmanned task. A subsystem can also provide communication and control abilities. Unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles that support communication, control abilities could be given as example. A node could support processing capability. In an unmanned system, main processor or the image processing processor, sensor data processor could be given example and as separate nodes of an unmanned system. A component is placed under a node, it provides commands and control. An instance is a piece of different information that is served under a component, a heat value or speed value can named as an instance. Depending on the how JAUS is integrated to our unmanned system there are three levels of integration. In level I integration JAUS compatibility is at subsystem level. Only the communication between two subsystems in a domain environment is done with JAUS protocol. In addition in level II integration the communication between node manager and subsystem itself is accomplish with JAUS message structure. Lastly in level II JAUS messages are applied at component level. In this Thesis JAUS structure and components are examined. To make JAUS compatible unmanned systems there are some open source projects. These projects are examined and the most optimal and updated version is selected for test section. Using JAUS++ code library is used as experimental purposes to create an Operator Control Unit and an Unmanned System which is Radxa Rock hardware. Radxa Rock is a single board computer by Radxa. It has a quad core processor, it can run android or some Linux distributions. It also got 80 pin headers to connect other sensors or use the GPIO. JAUS++ is created by The ACTIVE Laboratory based on a C++ implementation of JAUS for use in unmanned vehicles. This paper provides an introduction to the library for new developers, and give software architecture overview. After reading this document developers should know how to start using the JAUS++ library within an unmanned systems application. JAUS++ has three main libraries. Core library contains base classes for messages and services. Mobility library contains data structures for Global pose sensor and global waypoint driver. JAUS++ can be run at Linux and windows operating system platforms. The Message class is used to create a JAUS message structure. Current version of JAUS changed its architecture to use a service based framework. In JAUS++ library, Service class is used for message creation and manipulation. JAUS++ divides systems and subsystems into software components. JAUS++ components are designed for especially software reuse. In this research, the same software is used as in the Operator Control Unit software and the unmanned system itself with a little modification. However when we use specific components as Global Pose sensor, hardware implementation could be need to be done. In general because of the Object Oriented design, JAUS++ Component service highly reusable. To maintaining interoperability between the robotic systems and the operator control units is one of the key goals of JAUS++. Because of that the subsystems in JAUS uses same massage set. For instance an operator control unit can control all types of subsystems without any modification. JAUS has compatible with serial, and TCP networks. In general JAUS does not specify the communication method, any of the methods above can be used. After using JAUS++ advantages are observed as code reusability, modularity, and interoperability. Even if the technology improves, for instance the connection speed or the CPU speed grows, the JAUS software could still be effective as it is, because we define our system into JAUS as software parts. In addition, the JAUS code parts could be reused without any modification as the benefits of object oriented principle of inheritance.