AUV Control Software

[Lance]

Hi everyone. I'm working on a project at school where we need to build an autonomous submarine. One of the things we're trying to sort out is control software. We currently have three options we're investigating.

1. Labview
2. Robot operating system
3. Run linux and write all of our own control software.

We currently have a PC 104 stack running linux, however all the control code is broken. It was written a while ago in Java of all things, and not documented at all. It doesn't work properly anymore, and fixing it isn't really worth the effort.

Labview might be a possibility for us despite the insanely high hardware costs, because we might be getting full hardware sponsorship.

I've heard good things about ROS, but we're still investigating it.

I'm curious to know what the industry commonly uses for controlling vehicles.

[daedalus]

Hi,

I would ignore labview, its really doesn't save you a lot of time over writing actual code if you can program already.

I have used ROS / MRDS a fair bit in the past, and whilst both could be used for your problem, they each have quite a steep learning curve. Also distributed contract based programming is not as easy as plain C/C++.

The benefit of ROS/MRDS is that it makes collaboration easier, and allows you to publish your work as reusable modules. The other benefit is if someone has already released modules you can reuse (which might not be that much use for your application).

I remember seeing some publications on teams using both MRDS, and ROS for submarines, but I don't know if they published useful source.

[Lance]

Thanks for the input. What we ended up deciding on doing is we're going to build up everything ourselves in C/C++. Next meeting is planning out this monstrosity of a control system. Should be fun.