Generating a ROS/JAUS bridge for an autonomous ground vehicle

Robotic systems have benefitted from standardized middleware that can componentize the development of new capabilities for a robot. The popularity of these robotic middleware systems has resulted in sizable libraries of components that are now available to roboticists. However, many robotic systems (such as autonomous vehicles) must adhere to externally defined standards that do not contain a large repository of components. Due to the real-time and safety concerns that accompany the domain of unmanned systems, it is not trivial to interface these middleware systems. However, previous attempts to do so have succeeded at the cost of ad hoc design and implementation. This paper describes a domain-specific approach to the synthesis of a bridge between the popular Robotic Operating System (ROS) and the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS). The domain-specific nature of the approach permits the bridge to be limited in scope by the application's specific messages (and their attribute mappings between JAUS/ROS), resulting in smaller code size and overhead than would be incurred by a generic solution. Our approach is validated by tests performed on an unmanned vehicle with and without the JAUS/ROS bridge.